Well, this should be interesting to watch. The US Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brown v. Plata indicates that California will likely have to drastically reduce its prison population rather drastically over the next couple years Approximately 32,000 inmates must be released to comport with the Court’s close-vote decision which found that the state’s overpopulated prisons were Constitutionally problematic. One upside for the state will be incarceration cost savings – if we assume that each prisoner costs about $50,000/year to incarcerate – a relatively modest estimate – then this means a cost savings of 1.6 billion dollars annually to the state. Yes, that’s billion, not million. On the other hand, we can imagine that there may be significant collateral costs to the state and that these costs may simply be shifted to other entities (expanded demands on policing, local jails, etc.). Given the changing face of California incarceration outlined in this study (document), it will be interesting to see how they go about determining who to release.
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