Some county jails are facing lawsuits and similar federal oversight due to overcrowding. It’s the same issue that forced the state to relieve its over-crowding by shifting some low-level offenders to county control.
Some of the state’s overcrowding was relieved by the Realignment plan. But several studies claim the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to bring the prisons to constitutional levels will not be met by the Dec 27 deadline.
Seventeen of the state’s 58 counties currently have a court-ordered jail capacity limit.

LAWSUITS

The lawsuits filed against the counties claim overcrowding harms prisoners’ health and safety. Counties are getting some state funding to accommodate and house the increase in jail populations.
Since the 1980s, many laws have been implemented which keep offenders locked-up longer, regardless of the nature of the offense, which has dramatically increased the incarcerated population of the California.
The main driver of these conditions is the state’s Penal Code, which has become a “morass of complicated sentencing requirements developed over the decades more out of ‘tough on crime’ political posturing than science about what prevents crime,” Lenore Anderson wrote in a Sacramento Bee article.
Anderson claims that these issues can be solved by fixing the Penal Code and enhancing county innovation.
The Public Safety Realignment Law of 2011 allowed for the redistribution of certain low-level offenders to county jails by allocating a portion of state funds for county jails to adding jail capacity.
How the counties spend Realignment funding varies from county to county. Here are some examples:
Three of the 17 counties under federal oversight are Sacramento, Santa Barbara, and San Diego.
Sacramento County has been allocated $13 million in 2011-2012 for Realignment. Added jail capacity will take almost half of the funding, while health care treatment gets nothing.
San Diego County has received about $11.2 million under the law. One percent of the money is allocated for new jails, while health care would get about 12 percent of the funding.
Santa Barbara County will add jail capacity with about $760,000 of its $3.8 million in state funds. Health care services will get nearly $560,000. Almost $2.4 million will be spent on the sheriff’s and probation departments.

Police are using a strategy known as “stop and frisk” to reduce crime in New York City and other major metropolitan areas around the nation. The policy involves police officers stopping and patting down people they consider suspicious in an effort to preemptively stop crime, reports the New York Times.
Critics of this practice say the majority of the stops do not result in the discovery of illegal possessions or evidence of any wrongdoing. New York City police strongly defend this tactic as an effective way to bring down crime and get illegal guns off the streets, according to the Times.
In the first quarter of 2012, there were 203,500 street stops, up from 183,326 in the same quarter last year, the Times reports. Of those stopped and frisked, 85 percent were black or Hispanic Questionable Stop and Frisk Tactics Adopted by Cities Across the Nation men, which has caught the attention of civil rights groups, city council members and minority community leaders.
In 2011, New York City police stopped 46,784 women and frisked nearly 16,000, according to a New York Times analysis of police records. Guns were found in 59 frisks — about one third of one percent of the time.
Civil rights leaders have argued that the low gun-recovery rates strongly indicate that the stop and frisk encounters are unjustified.
A federal judge has said the city’s records indicate that many of these stops did not meet constitutional standards for searches. Police officers are not allowed to search the pockets of citizens based on a hunch or job performance quota; however, they may pat someone down if there is a reason to believe that the person is carrying an illegal weapon.
Several groups, including the NAACP, labor unions, religious groups and several ethnic and cultural organizations, continue to organize protests and marches to rally against the practice of stop and frisk.
One particular demonstration in June 2012 was led by Rev. Al Sharpton and other civil rights leaders. More than 299 organizations endorsed the silent march, which was noted for its size and diversity.

Federal officials are supporting a Native American claim that denying tobacco to prisoners for religious ceremonies is discriminatory.
In a brief filed in July, the U.S. Department of Justice said the state of South Dakota’s position “runs contrary to the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.”
State officials eliminated Native American exemption for tobacco use in its prisons because, they say, “tobacco was being sold or bartered and inmates had been caught separating it from their pipe mixtures and prayer ties,” reported The Associated Press.
Native Americans filed a federal lawsuit in 2009 seeking to reverse the South Dakota Department of Correction’s ban. A similar lawsuit filed by a San Quentin inmate is pending against the California prison system.
San Quentin Native Americans Reggie Azbill and Chad Holzhouser say they are using kinicknick as a tobacco substitute in their ceremonies. Kinicknick is a blend of herbs, including peppermint, sweet grass, white sage, and cedar.
“Other religions have their Bibles; we have our ceremonial tobacco,” Azbill said. “Tobacco is like our Bible. It is the way we get connected with the Creator.”
“Smoking the kinicknick is just not the same as tobacco,” Holzhouser said. “It’s like wearing dirty laundry.”
New Mexico and Nevada have smoking bans in their prison systems, but allow the use of tobacco during religious ceremonies, according to the AP report.