Russo: Panel May Cap California Prison Population

The federal judges who are overseeing the attempt to rescue the California prison health system are considering “whether California’s prison system needs to have a cap on its inmate population to alleviate overcrowding because of its deleterious impact on the health care,” according to Frank Russo at the California Progress Report.

It sounds like the prospects for actually imposing a cap are rather distant. Meanwhile, there appears to be an increasing sense that the political stalemate around the prison system is almost totally intractable. Russo quotes District Court Judge Thelton Henderson saying “This hearing has reaffirmed that there is a problem and that the current system won’t solve the problem.”