Lawyers for California also argued that allowing certain inmates to be paroled early would deplete a program that allowed prisons to fight wildfires.
Source: Jackie Kucinich
Ordered to reduce the population of California’s overcrowded prisons, lawyers from then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s office made the case that some non-violent offenders needed to stay incarcerated or else the prison system would lose a source of cheap labor.
In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California’s prisons were so overcrowded that they violated the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Three years later, in early 2014, the state was ordered to allow non-violent, second time offenders who have served half of their sentence to be eligible for parole.
By September 2014, plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit were back in court, accusing California of slow-walking the process, which lawyers for Harris’s office denied.
