The Role of Collaborative Courts in California’s Criminal Justice System

By Dan Lyman*

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In 2006, declaring a state of emergency, California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, said “immediate action is necessary to prevent death and harm caused by California’s severe prison overcrowding.”[1] Despite California’s efforts, prison overcrowding persisted. In 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States held that California’s overcrowding created a prison system that “falls below the standard of decency that inheres in the Eighth Amendment.”[2] For over a decade, the State’s prisons operated at roughly double capacity—regularly housing as many as two-hundred prisoners in gymnasiums with just two or three correctional officers and roughly one toilet per fifty-four prisoners.[3] In 2006, Governor Schwarzenegger recognized that such overcrowding created a substantial risk for transmitting infectious illnesses and increased the suicide rate about one death per week—up eighty percent from the national average.[4] Continue reading “The Role of Collaborative Courts in California’s Criminal Justice System” →