The Turn Around State? Does California Have One of the Finest Prison Systems in the Nation

As readers of this blog know, Governor Jerry Brown of California has combined leadership on reducing California's bloated prison population with relentless attacks on the courts whose orders have made that badly needed "realignment" political possible.  Still even I was surprised by the air of unreality to the Governor's dual press conferences yesterday backing up the state's legal filings yesterday seeking an end to the federal court oversight of California's prison health system, and a respite from its prison population cap (listen to the California Report's coverage here).

We've gone from serious constitutional problem (sic) to one of the finest prison systems in the United States.  Most of the people get far better care for mental health problems or physical well being inside prison then they'll get when released on the streets. (Cecilio Padilla's reporting on Fox 40 here) 

The state's main correctional problem now, according to the governor, is the court's oversight and lawyers.

While acknowledging court intervention had forced vast improvements to a system that was in crisis, Brown said overly intrusive judges had unleashed a feeding frenzy of highly paid attorneys "running around the prisons looking for problems."(Paige St. John in the LA Times here)

I have not had time to read the state's legal filings (almost done grading, almost) but these claims are remarkable and possibly outrageous.  First let's remember the context.  Judge Thelton Henderson put the state's prison health care system in receivership in 2005 finding that after three years the state had accomplished very little toward a settlement agreement for improving health care and that a prisoner a week was dying of unmet medical needs.  In 2009 a three-judge court ordered the population cap finding that chronic hyper overcrowding (with many units housing 300 percent of their already optimistic design capacity) was exacerbating the medical and mental health problems and making improvements impossible.  Then Attorney General Brown appealed to the US Supreme Court.  In Brown v. Plata (he was now Governor) the US Supreme Court upheld that order against all the same arguments the Governor is once again making.  Describing the lack of health care as approximating "torture" in its significance, Justice Kennedy wrote:

Just as a prisoner may starve if not fed, he or she may suffer or die if not provided adequate medical care. A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.

The evidence in the record, what Governor Brown calls "constitutional problems" included the following profiles of medical failure:

California's prisons were designed to meet the medical needs of a population at 100% of design capacity and so have only half the clinical space needed to treat the current population. ... A correctional officer testified that, in one prison, up to 50 sick inmates may be held together in a 12–by 20–foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment. .... The number of staff is inadequate, and prisoners face significant delays in access to care. A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5–week delay in referral to a specialist; a prisoner with “constant and extreme” chest pain died after an 8–hour delay in evaluation by a doctor; and a prisoner died of testicular cancer after a “failure of MDs to work up for cancer in a young man with 17 months of testicular pain.” 

We can all hope that conditions like this are a thing of the past in California.  The fact that they persisted in the state for at least a decade is an utter disgrace that calls for investigations and accountability, rather than euphemisms and attacks on the courts.  But the very tone of the Governor's remarks are good reasons to hope the courts will not relinquish oversight.  The fact that prisoners now get better health care than they get when they return to the streets may say much more about how poor community mental and physical health care is in California's communities of rural and urban disadvantage.  It is also the case that prison is a far harder place on physical and mental health than even impoverished free communities because of crowded conditions, racialized gang divisions, and systematic lack of opportunities for education or work.  The Governor coincidentally also acknowledged successful treatment for prostrate cancer, describing himself as "raring to go" (read Steven Harmon's reporting in the Mercury News here).  If he thinks lawyers are gold plating our prison health care perhaps he should demonstrate that by receiving his future cancer follow up treatment at Folsom or San Quentin (one can hope his outcome will be better than the young prisoner who died of testicular cancer after 17 months of reporting pain).

Is California now one of the "finest prison systems" in the Nation?  A lot depends on what we mean by finest.  If that mean's strong educational, vocational, and rehabilitation programs, that has not been true since the Governor's father was Governor.  Does it mean keeping the largest number of people locked up?  Thanks to the courts we have now lost that status to Texas, (but they are at least more competent managers).  The truth is California has followed a path of indiscriminate imprisonment for decades.  Most of the damage was done during the 1980s under Republicans like Deukmejian and Wilson, and Democrats like Gray Davis who committed the state to mass incarceration policies.  While Governor Brown's realignment policies are an important turn away from that pattern he has yet to articulate a convincing vision of public safety, and in his attacks on the courts he suggests he does not have one.

The claim that further efforts to reduce the prisoner population to meet the court order will endanger public safety is baseless.  The reality is that California prison sentences are not based on prospective risk and California prisons offer no serious rehabilitation programs to the overwhelming majority of prisoners.  Reducing sentences by days, weeks, or even months (all that would be necessary to meet the targets) is unlikely to alter how those prisoners will behave once released.

Les Mis: Why do we idealize Jean Valjean and Act like Javert?

Since it opened on Broadway in 1987, the musical Les Miserables has captured the American imagination, running until 2003; the fourth longest running show in Broadway history.  The movie version, starring Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman, just opened and the show I saw last night was packed.  The story, based on Victor Hugo's 1862 novel of the same name, tells the story of Jean Valjean, a peasant condemned to 19 years of slavery in prison for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving nephew.  Embittered and degraded by his prison experience, Valjean commits a property crime almost immediately against a kindly priest who had given him shelter for the night.  Saved from re-imprisonment by the priest's refusal to accuse him, Val Jean commits himself to life of service and virtue, a path he concludes he can only follow by breaking his parole and going underground.  The rest of the story tracks his success and efforts helping others always shadowed by a police officer named Javert who is obsessed with tracking down and re-imprisoning Valjean.

The battle of these protagonists is set against the suffering of the French poor in the years after the defeat of Napoleon and the revolutionary sentiments stirring in Paris but the moral drama comes down to two questions.  First, does justice require absolute adherence to the letter of the law and condemnation of those who break it, or instead to meeting human needs and showing mercy and forgiveness to other?  Second, can a person who commits a crime change, or do they carry a moral failure that will always reassert itself.  Valjean who broke the law only to save a child and is himself saved by the mercy and forgiveness of the priest embodies the ideal of justice as humanity.  While his criminality seems confirmed by his committing a crime soon after being released from prison, he devotes the rest of his life to hard honest work and to helping others.   Javert embodies the ideal of justice as strict adherence to law.  Although surrounded by evidence that the savage inequalities of French society makes the protection of the law a cruel hoax, Javert believes that there can never be a greater priority than obedience.  Javert also believes that once a criminal, always a criminal.  In each of their encounters, Javert reminds Valjean that he is a dangerous criminal who will always return to committing crime.   Of course, the audience has no problem deciding which side justice and morality are on.  To my observation, nobody roots for Javert to catch Valjean and return him to prison.  We all want Jean Valjean to remain free.

Although the story is French, and the musical production originally British, American audiences love it deeply, and recognize in Jean Valjean a classic American hero; a character who is redeemed from a life of crime by the intervention of others, and through their own commitment and courage attain both worldly success and moral virtue.  But herein lies the irony.  If we Americans identify with Jean Valjean, why does our justice system, more than any other in the world, embody the spirit and philosophy of Javert?  In no other nation are people so routinely incarcerated for breaking the law, no matter how trivial the violation, or compelling the need behind it.  Moreover, in the very decades that we have been lining up to see Les Mis, we have enacted a legal system committed to  the inflexible imposition of harsh justice and the impossibility of reform.  Indeed our state and federal courts today are largely in the hands of Javert and his disciples.

Javert himself provides two interesting clues to why Americans both dislike and embrace the harsh version of justice he represents.  First, Javert repeatedly refers to Jean Valjean as "dangerous" and there is a hint that his tremendous physical strength, and strong emotions, contain some more general menace.  Americans in the violent 1970s and 1980s seemed to accept that security requires us to ignore our intuitions about justice (a theme that continues in the current war on terror).  Second, Javert discloses that he himself is from an impoverished background, but has obtained success without breaking the law.  In Javert's zeal to punish Jean Valjean is disguised a need to deny that they have anything in common.  Likewise American punitiveness is powered in part by a need to maintain a moral gulf between the goodness we imagine in ourselves, and the evil it must be defined against.

Put a fork in it: The paper of record declares Mass Incarceration Dead

So forgive my mixing New York metaphors and class signifiers (I've never really lived in Gotham), but as cultural markers go today's frontpage story in the New York Times, using the phrase "mass incarceration" and declaring  it dead (or at least out of favor among everyone they know and like) is an important occasion in the life of those of us who want to see it so. Transformative social policies, penal and otherwise, are primarily acts of imagination and John Tierney's article, which spilled over into two full pages of the national print edition, offered a wide ranging and thoroughly critical look at some of the policies that have defined our penal sensibilities for the past forty years.  Tierney, no less the Times "Findings" columnist, promises more to come, but today's dose offered up a large helping of reportage on how the policy elite, particularly nationally prominent social scientists  and the politicians who sometimes seek to find space for innovation, now view mass incarceration.

Tierney's coverage (and the consensus it may have captured) is highly concentrated on one part of mass incarceration, the war on drugs.  The article profiles half a dozen Americans who have already served years, sometimes decades, on Life Without Parole Sentences, for non-violent drug crimes, generally involving possession of large quantities of drugs for sale, and many of them were accomplices with a less substantial role even in that crime than others.  As the profiles make clear, none of these prisoners, and many others like them, have done the kind of unforgivable things that most American associate with LWOP sentences, namely murder, or at least kidnapping, rape, child sexual abuse.  Nor on an individual level do any of them pose any significant risk of committing those kinds of acts in the future.  Instead, their incarceration is premised on the prospect that LWOP sentences would deter many from entering drug dealing, and incapacitate others committed to the life.

Tierney's reporting is particularly significant for naming mass incarceration as such (even if misses the opportunity to cite or interview some of the social scientists who named as it such, like David Garland who is a couple dozen blocks away at NYU).  After opening with Stephanie George, a woman sentenced to LWOP for drug possession more than a dozen years ago, Tierney moves beyond the individual to place it in

a revolution in public policy, often called mass incarceration, that appears increasingly dubious to both conservative and liberal social scientists. They point to evidence that mass incarceration is no longer a cost-effective way to make streets safer, and may even be promoting crime instead of suppressing it.

Also significant is that Tierney traces the genealogy of mass incarceration from policy to political success through the enormous intellectual influence of the late James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who taught at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine, and whose book Thinking About Crime (originally published in 1975) was in my view the key text of mass incarceration in its embryonic form.  His framing of crime as an economic and later an almost biological problem, caught the imagination not only of the conservative Republicans he personally aligned himself with, but many leading Democratic politicians as well (for my own version of the genealogy see my "Mass Incarceration: From Social Policy to Social Problem" in Joan Petersilia and Kevin Reitz, The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections").  According to Tierney, mass incarceration is now viewed as empirically dubious by contemporary social scientists.  Stephen Levitt, one of the most prominent exponents of the thesis that mass incarceration worked (at least until the mid 1990s), suggests that now the marginal value of the prisoners being incarcerated is so low from a crime control point of view that we ought to have at least a third fewer of them.  Criminologists Peter Reuter and Jonathan Caulkins note that the declining level of drug prices and wide availability have conclusively proven that locking up drug dealers cannot shrink let alone stop that market.

The change here is not in the social science, where the consensus was against mass incarceration a decade ago, but in the sense that it might matter to politicians (especially at the state and local level who have the most to gain from shrinking correctional budgets) and that it might be safe to come further out in this nice warm water of policy consensus.   Of course the cultural salience of papers may be shrinking.  The paper of record is not what is was in ''64 when Abe Rosenthal helped make living in cities seem insanely dangerous from a crime perspective by blaming the Kitty Genovese murder on bystander effects (which come up in Joe Nocera's column this week). The problem is that with penal matters things can get hot fast.  Thus a few notes to keep in mind as we watch the further role out of this important series of columns and the response to it.

• Bear in mind that despite the importance of social scientists like James Q Wilson in legitimizing it, mass incarceration was not primarily sold to the public on its social science bonafides and indeed Wilson, despite having been a great social scientist up to that point marked a transition to being mostly an ideologue with the very book Thinking About Crime.  The book was not filled with great social science theory or data, but in fact was largely based on the presumption that when the price of crime goes up, the amount of it must go down.  Instead the marketing of mass incarceration was its fit with a series of cultural experiences, especially the racialized fear of rioting in the late 1960s and the theme of criminal monsters (serial killers and sex offenders) that began in the 1970s, along with the trope of government bureaucratic bungling which made any crime policy not built of brick and mortar apparently unreliable.  Creating a just and legitimate alternative to mass incarceration will take a lot more than "freakonomics" (which is closer in spirit to what got us into it), especially political and moral discourse and struggle about what mass incarceration meant.

• The war on drugs only accounts for a portion of mass incarceration.  A large and growing share of it is the unnecessary length of prison sentences for violent crimes, including the "unforgivable ones".  While Tierney and his sample of social science elites and politicians steer a wide berth around any possibility of reconsidering LWOP and other long sentences for violent crimes, reforms that fail to do so will leave us with a system that looks a lot like mass incarceration, maybe a third smaller (per Professor Levitt's preferences, against 5x increase since 1970), perhaps even more racialized, and because of the significant role of health care costs, perhaps not much cheaper in the long run.  More importantly, unless we deconstruct the historically situated (but now forgotten) fears that underly our extreme sentences for violent crime, it will be easy for policy entrepreneurs to promote new wars on drugs and related forms of deviance in flusher fiscal times.

Weather Report: Strange weather or climate change?

The most important political storm in recent history (was it the storm or the meme?) "Super-Storm Sandy" helped not only President Obama but re-raise the question of whether unusual weather is a sign of profound climate change, in this case global average temperature rises caused by human carbon effects.  When it comes to our massive penal state, recent events have raised a similar question.  Are recent change in prison growth patterns, judicial decisions, and electoral results variation within the norm or evidence of a more profound change that could mark the end of our forty year experiment with mass incarceration?  I'm struck by an analogy that Philip Smith makes in his great contribution to the Sage Handbook of Punishment and Society (edited by Richard Sparks and myself, as a handbook its a wee pricey, but put it on your holiday wish list or appeal to your local library to order it).  In his chapter on cultural analysis of punishment, "Punishment and Meaning: The Cultural Sociological Approach", Smith suggests that many of the classical sociological theories of punishment: "do a great job of explaining the longterm penal climate" but are poor at making sense of local and short-term variation.  Foucault's account of disciplinary society, for example, makes great sense of the emergence of the cellular prison as a dominant mode of punishment, but can it help us understand California's Three-Strikes law, or declining public support for capital punishment in California.  Smith argues persuasively that we need the tools of cultural sociology to make sense of the short-term and local and to connect them to the broader more structural features of penality, but the question that we face at the moment is whether the local and possibly short-term penal events we are seeing represent a spurt of unusual weather within a stable penal climate, or are we witnessing climate change,  Our friends Ian Loader and Richard Sparks lend us a more specific climate metaphor in their 2010 book, Public Criminology? suggesting that the penal climate (globally?  or at least in the North?) has gotten decidedly hotter due to the politicization of crime policy.  Are these recent events in California signals of cooling in one of the hottest penal states in the world, or just a spate of moderation in a longterm trend toward extreme penal heat?

So what events do we have in mind?

1. The drop in California's (and the US) prison population in both absolute and relative to population terms since 2010
2. The Supreme Court's stunningly strong (although nail bitingly close) decision in Brown v. Plata, requiring California to impose structural restraints on its prison population and implying that the human dignity retained by prisoners may present a broad protection against penal excess.
3. The results of the November 2012 election in California which saw voters overwhelmingly adopt a moderation of California's notoriously excessive 3-Strikes law, narrowly defeat a death penalty repeal (which would have been a global first if it had passed), and perhaps most importantly, comfortably adopt a tax increase (albeit temporary and regressive in many respects).

As a student of punishment and society I've contributed to the view that California and the US generally has experienced a penal climate change beginning in the 1970s that have produced mass incarceration and the culture of fear that locks down others in gated communities and sterile office parks.  Like others (Loic Wacquant, David Garland, Nicola Lacey, Bernard Harcourt),  I have thought about this penal climate shift as broadly related to what may or may not be well labelled "neo-liberalism", the very clear shift in political-economy from state centered and protectionist toward market-centered and unregulated (each account provides a very different analysis of how these political-economic changes mediate penal policies).  Was the financial crisis of 2008 the beginning of the end of "neo-liberalism"? Is Obamacare really the beginning of a new phase of strong regulatory and welfare state development?  I'd love to think so personally, but I'm skeptical.

Instead the relationship between "neo-liberalism" and the hot penal climate may be far looser than implied by some of the sociological accounts.  Building "neo-liberalism" in the California and the US in the 1980s and 1990s may have gone facilitated and been facilitated by building and filling prisons but that does not mean the two must remain aligned.  It is a sad fact of penal history (see my own chapter in the Handbook) that penal practices fail regularly and at times spectacularly.  Rising political alignments often find it extremely helpful to be able criticize the penal status quo, but after forty years the penal status quo is now associated with that alignment, in such instances, the alignment stays and penal policies change, sometimes in profound ways (as in the transformations in penalty that marked the rise of working class voters at the beginning of the 20th century, see David Garland's Punishment and Welfare).  Mass incarceration has failed, spectacularly in the form of overcrowding, humanitarian medical failure, and a mounting chronic illness crisis.

All of these, were in central display in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Plata decision.  In my forthcoming book Mass Incarceration on Trial (sorry if you pre-ordered, its delayed due to my editing but coming out next Fall) I try to unpack what that decision teaches us about changes in the social meaning of incarceration, and about how we can further those changes to make sure short-term and local weather variation moves toward penal climate change, and cooling in particular.

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If you are in the Bay Area I'll be trying to answer some of these questions tonight at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Avenue, Berkeley, at 7 pm tonight.  Dress for heavy weather and come on by and join the discussion.

2012: Hope and Change Election Too

I know, Obama's slogan this time is "Forward" and Mitt Romney is campaigning (false as ever) as the real change, but at least in California, this election is as much, or more, about hope and change as in 2008, when those words hung across the landscape of Berkeley like Christmas decorations on December 23.

Yes on Propositions 34 & 36
Forty years after California (and much of the nation) began its turn toward penal severity and mass incarceration, California voters have a chance to signal that the hot emotions of racialized crime fear has finally run its course.  It is true that both measures are modest in their reach.  Proposition 34 would repeal the death penalty, only to replace it with Life imprisonment Without Parole.  Since the vast majority of California's more than 700 death row inmates are likely to die in prison of old age under any plausible scenario, this would change little on the ground.  Nor does it count on people being necessarily less afraid of crime.  Indeed its primary populist appeal is to move the funds saved from lawyering death cases to funding police departments in investigating cold murder and rape cases.  Proposition 36 would allow prisoners serving life sentences under California's notoriously broad 3-Strikes law, to seek re-sentencing if their third strike was for a non-violent, non-serious crime (and assuming they were not already convicted of a murder or rape); a measure expected to reach only about 3500 of the more than 30,000 prisoners  serving enhanced terms under the 3-Strikes law.

Still, both measures represent a big change that should be embraced by all Californians, a change away from penal measures intended to signal severity as an end in itself, not just despite, but in-spite of the fact that they delivered little objective crime control.  The hope here is not just a hope that serious violent crime has gone away (even with the crime decline the violence in next door Oakland makes that difficult) but hope that new approaches, like innovative policing and restorative justice, can reduce crime and address the community scars of violent crime without incarceration.  Forty years ago the conventional wisdom in criminology was that neither prison rehabilitation programs or police patrol tactics could meaningfully reduce crime.  Today neither position is dominant.  Furthermore, despite their poll tested pragmatic moderateness, both propositions would signal major change 1.) because they both deal with violent crime which I have long called the "hard back of mass incarceration" in contrast to the "soft underbelly" of drug crime and parole violations; and 2.) they are voter propositions, a form of law making long sought to favor fear over reason.

Yes on Proposition 30
For nearly forty years the state of California has been disinvesting in education, both K through 12, and higher education, in order to reduce taxes.  At the start this must have been very tempting, since California taxes were relatively high and our education system was excellent.  Now our tax system is highly uneven and unreliable, but manifestly fails to meet the state's basic revenue needs, and our education system is diminished at every level.  Proposition 30 is again a modest turn toward hope and change.  In asking for voters to approve a tax increase (and not just bond measures for debt), Proposition 30 breaks with decades of lying to voters about the realities facing the state.  It asks not just for an income tax increase on high income earners, but a sales tax increase that will be paid by everyone.  In this mildly progressive but still broad base, Proposition 30 hints of California's New Deal period when the state made the great investments that turned it into the dominant state of the postwar period.  The hope here is modest.  The tax increase is temporary and the funds would stop the hemorrhaging of education not reinvest in it.

Re-elect President Obama
It is true that for readers of this blog, the President has not been a major change agent.  We did not expect him to lead on issues like "mass incarceration," and his promises to end our national disgrace at Guantanamo ran into a wall of Congressional fear.  His Justice Departments aggressive prosecution of whistle blowers like Bradley manning, and the quiet war on marijuana, while letting financial crooks sleep on their gains has been a mystery to many of his supporters.  Still, the President has kept his promise to never "govern through fear."   While he has steadily sought to address the priority threats of George Bush's fear regime, including ordering the military execution of Osama Bin Laden, President Obama has not generated a new list of monsters, struggling to let uprisings in the Arab world proceed without demonizing the new leaders.  Most importantly, in getting even a modest national health system and re-regulating the financial services industry, President Obama has begun to change the machinery of governance, moving us from the model of  punish and prosecute that was "governing through crime," to approaches that require cooperation, trust, and new positive benefits for citizens.

Cop killers, Baby killers, Serial killers? Did Steve Cooley Just Lie on the KQED?

In a debate on KQED's California Report about Proposition 34, LA DA Steve Cooley told a statewide listening audience that only "cop killers, baby killers, and serial killers" get sent to death row from LA County.  Really?  That sounds false to me.  There are well over 700 people on death row and a clear minority of them meet that description, in fact, very few are.  From LA?  In 2009, LA County produced more death sentences then the state of Texas, were there really that many baby killers, cop killers, and serial killers convicted in that year?  I'm in the middle of my teaching week (yes this really is like a job) and don't have time to run this down, but some one reading this, student, reporter, active citizen, nail this down because I don't think its fit for a District Attorney to lie on an important issue of public policy on the radio to the citizens of this state.

Why does Steve Cooley really want the death penalty?  In part, I would guess, because the death penalty is a large weapon in plea bargaining that can force many murder defendants with a credible issue, to plead guilty to a non-capital murder and disappear for life (perhaps for a crime they did not commit).  In Governing through Crime I offered a more political view.  Prosecutors became vengeance-seekers-in-chief during the era of mass incarceration and used that stature to get elected statewide.  The death penalty debate fuels the vengeance end of the crime policy debate (distorting the entire criminal justice system) but providing great fuel for prosecutors to rise to power.  Steve Cooley lost narrowly for AG in 2010 to the current incumbent, a very quiet opponent of the death penalty.  One suspects he would rather be talking about the death penalty in next statewide election too.  Proposition 34 would end that death debate and move Californians on the the serious work of reframing our overheated underperforming penal system.

No Governor Brown, Thank God we Have Federal Courts

The most amazing quote in Marisa Lagos' front page story on realignment in this morning's SF Chron (read the story here) comes from Governor Brown:

"It's on schedule, and it's in practice in all 58 counties, which are quite diverse," Brown said in a phone interview last week. "I think all in all, we made a solid transition, and thank God for the fact we had the realignment plan - or we would have been forced by judges to let felons out of prison or to build new cells, which we can ill afford.

Now I'm generally inclined to give Governor Brown time to redress the prison crisis.  When he left office in 1983 the prison population had already begun its disastrous rise, but it was still modest and was driven mostly by county level prosecutors and judges (although his Determinate Sentence Law, adopted for other reasons, had effectively cut off the state's ability to reduce prison population on the other end).  To my knowledge he was not a supporter of the many laws passed since, including Thee Strikes, that helped supersize California's prison population beyond any rational or humane limits.  Although he appealed the Plata case to the Supreme Court as California's Attorney General, that is the usual routine for AGs and it takes an exceptional act of courage to do something different.  But the contempt for the courts in Governor Brown's statement at a time when only because of the courts are we beginning to remedy a human rights disaster that has blighted our state for over a decade is appalling, beneath him, must be called out.

The statement is so wrong on every level that it must be deconstructed and addressed point by point, but this is college, so first a pop quiz

• Question.  When did every governor start sounding like Ross Barnett of Mississippi?
• Answer. When the war on crime made it patriotic to trash courts for defending the human rights of people in prison.

"thank God for the fact that we had the realignment plan"

At least now we know where it came from and when we can expect it to be revealed (at the end of time?).  In fact, most of the ideas in the plan come from (or are mysteriously similar to) the proposals presented to the three-judge court in Plata which had been developed for the court by the state's best criminologists, people generally ignored by the state's political leadership.

"or we would have been forced by judges to let felons out of prison or to build new cells"

The court ordered not a single prisoner to be released.  They gave the state two years to reduce its population crisis from a steady state of over 200% of capacity to 137% of capacity and then outlined numerous ways the state could do that.  As the court documented many of these prison sentences were actually reducing public safety.

The court was forced to set a population cap because the state continued to pack minor offenders and parole violators into prisons where a prisoner a week was dying of unmet medical needs.  In their zeal to sell us our own fear, California's politicians presided over a system of industrial scale torture in which inmates suffering severe mental illness were left untreated in the horrifying conditions of overcrowding and insecurity, and in which prisoners suffering manifest symptoms of heart attacks, and cancerous invasions of their organs without treatment or even sympathy for their suffering.

let felons out of prison

Felon is a euphemism for denying the humanity of a human being.  In a state which has lost touch with the humanity of its prisoners on a such a vast scale it is appalling for the chief executive still responsible for returning our prisons to some semblance of constitutional order to use that euphemism.  Prisons are not containment zones for zombies.  They are legal institutions for the punishment and rehabilitation of human beings.  Our state has proven itself incapable of operating such legal places.  Our leaders should be holding the officials responsible accountable, not swaggering and criticizing our courts.

As Justice Kennedy wrote in Brown v. Plata, the case that will carry Governor Brown's name into history along with governors like George Wallace and Ross Barnett:

A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society. 

I say, thank God for the "concept of human dignity," and thank our federal courts for enforcing it in this sorry state.