By Megan Doyle Corcoran

California’s adult prison population bulges out of the state’s 33 adult institutions, which are at almost 200 percent capacity.  Approximately 175,000 individuals are housed in California prisons, and the rate of incarceration in the state, like that of the rest of the nation, is not dropping.  At this point, California stakeholders are all too aware of the urgency of instituting some kind of change to ensure that the cramped prison conditions are alleviated while public safety is respected.  In fact, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is presently engaged in extensive litigation in federal court, in which District Court Judge Thelton Henderson is threatening to place the California prison system into a federal receivership, as he did to the prison health care system in October 2005.  Read more »