BROWN V. PLATA DECISION: OVERCROWDING & PRISON CONDITIONS

In the Plata v. Newsom case filed in 2001, CDCR was found to provide substandard medical care to people in its custody in violation of their constitutional rights. This systemic failure was largely due to massive overcrowding California had the largest prison population in the United States for decades, a vestige from the tough on crime and three-strikes law era. In 2006, the prison population peaked with more than 165,000 people incarcerated for a system designed to house only 85,000.

Inadequate access to healthcare within CDCR also led to an average of 64 preventable deaths every year. As a result, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson, in the Plata case, placed CDCR under a receivership in 2006 and moved its healthcare system to a new entity, the California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS).

That remedy proved insufficient to addres the serious deficiencies in medical care. A few years later, a three judge panel ordered the agency to reduce its population by 44,000, but this decision was put on hold as the case went to the Supreme Court. In 2011, in a decision known as Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding in California state prisons was the primary cause of the unconstitutional medical and mental health care and ordered CDCR to reduce its prison population to 137 5% of its design capacity

The resulting drastic decrease in the California state prison population was only partially offset by a corresponding rise in the jail population, and despite the population reduction measures in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, most state prisons remain overcrowded. Currently, CDCR still hovers at 108.5% of design capacity, with four prisons at more than 150% capacity.