Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Sunday, September 06, 2009

California Takes Prison Overcrowding Fight To Supreme Court

The Mercury News

California officials Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a lower court order that forces the state to quickly devise a plan to shed more than 40,000 inmates from its overcrowded prisons.

In a 46-page petition to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who handles emergency appeals from the Western states, California Attorney General Jerry Brown asked for an immediate stay of a three-judge panel's Aug. 4 order requiring the state to submit its prisoner release plan within 45 days.

Judges on the federal court panel Thursday rejected the state's bid for a stay, saying they've been "more than patient with the state and its officials" in the years-long legal battle over conditions inside California's prison system.

But California officials say the court has put the state in an impossible spot by requiring it to come up with a plan to reduce the prison population by one-fourth by Sept. 18.

"Every day that the three-judge court's order hangs over California, it places enormous strains on the state's existing resources and creates intolerable anxiety for both officials and residents of the nation's most populous state," state lawyers wrote to Kennedy.

State officials are asking Kennedy to put the order on hold while they appeal the entire ruling to the Supreme Court in the coming month.


3 comments:

Eugene UK said...

Addressing the issue of prison overcrowding is not ‘soft’ on crime; it's a step in the right direction.

Prison overcrowding exerts enormous pressure on prison staff and can compromise their ability to deal with dangerous, violent offenders. Prison overcrowding often means transferring inmates to prisons further from their homes and communities. This not only comes as a greater cost to you, the taxpayer, but drastically damages their chances of proper rehabilitation. At the Howard League for Penal Reform we believe greater use of community sentences are an effective means of cutting crime and the costs of prison overcrowding. Find out more at www.howardleague.org

Anonymous said...

What does the term "over crowding" mean? If the space, any space, is already "crowded," how can that same space be "over crowded?" A clear definition of terms is required here in order to have an accurate picture of conditions of confinement, etc.

Anonymous said...

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Scalia, Thomas and Sotomayor. That's 3 out of 9. They will keep the crowded conditions. Scalia and Thomas are callous about executing innocent inmates. They don't care. Sotomayor is callous about releasing any wrongfully convicted individual, and that is WITH proof of innocence, as with Jeffrey Deskovic.