Federal judges reconvene to decide prison overcrowding issue

A special three-judge panel reconvenes Tuesday and is prepared to decide whether prison crowding has become so bad that inmates cannot receive proper care. If they do, a case rooted in several court challenges dating back more than two decades will move to a second phase. In that phase, the judicial panel will decide if lowering the inmate population is the only way to fix the problems. That could result in an order to release tens of thousands of California inmates before their terms are finished, a move Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republican lawmakers say would endanger public safety.

Michael Bien and other civil rights attorneys want the panel to order the prison population cut from 156,300 inmates to about 110,000. "Releasing 50,000 inmates to the streets is obviously a public safety risk and it doesn't fix the problem," Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said in an interview. "There are still underlying problems and we want to fix them. Early release, though, isn't the way to do that."

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