New rules for good-conduct releases won’t be halted

Judge says district attorneys should have acted sooner to block

A judge in Sacramento has refused to halt the state prison system’s use of new good-time credit policies designed to speed up the release of more than 76,000 inmates, ruling that 44 California district attorneys could have sued to stop the new rules before they took effect May 1.

In an order issued late Tuesday, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Shama Mesiwala rejected a request for a preliminary injunction that would have forced the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to return to its old good conduct credit rules.

The judge issued a tentative ruling denying the injunction last week, but wrote then that there is a “likelihood” the prosecutors ultimately will prevail in their lawsuit.

In Tuesday’s final ruling she found that CDCR’s intent to produce new rules was “foreshadowed” in May 2020 in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget summary and that the proposed rules were published April 7.

“Thus, based on this timeline, there was an earlier, reasonable window of time during which plaintiffs could have acted to obtain a temporary restraining order to enjoin the implementation of CDCR’s new system and calculations to preserve the prior status quo,” the judge wrote.

Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert and 43 other DAs sued over the rules, claiming that they should not have been adopted without input from victims and their families and decrying what they said would be a rush to release thousands of dangerous inmates.

“The regulations were passed under a claim of an emergency and first made public on Friday, April 30, 2021, at 3:00 p.m,” Schubert’s office said in a statement issued in May. “These regulations would result in the early release of some of California’s most violent criminals.”

Schubert’s chief deputy contended Tuesday that the judge’s order signals a belief that the

DAs will win their lawsuit.

“We are pleased with the court’s ruling that we are likely to succeed on the merits due to CDCR’s failure to consider victims’ concerns and public safety before making sweeping changes to the sentences of over 76,000 state prison inmates,” Sacramento Chief Deputy District Attorney Rod Norgaard said in an email statement. “While we wait for a trial on the merits we have grave concerns that violent criminals will be released early into our communities and will pose a significant risk to public safety.”

CDCR contended that the rules were written under authority granted by voters when they passed Proposition 57 in 2016, and that “the emergency regulations are a result of that voter mandate.”

Under the changes, inmates convicted of violent crimes earn one day of good conduct credit for every two days served instead of one day of credit for every four days, CDCR says. Non-violent secondand third-strikers who previously earned one day of credit for every three served get one day of credit for every day served, CDCR says.

Inmates also are allowed to get to parole board hearings sooner than under the old regulations.

Prosecutors have warned that since the COVID-19 pandemic began more than a year ago emergency rules to reduce crowding in prisons would lead to inmates being released who should still be in prison.

However, initial attempts to implement the new credits have led to complaints from some inmates that computation errors have, in fact, increased the length of their sentences.

Inmate firefighter Donnell Marin was told in April that his projected release date was July 23, but under the new policies, he was told his projected release date had been changed to April 2022 and, later, to September 2022, according to his wife, Taniesha Moore.

After The Sacramento Bee asked CDCR officials for an explanation last week, Moore said she received a call from the agency telling her the matter would be straightened out.

Marin’s projected release date late Tuesday was listed as being in October, according to online records.

Marin was not the only inmate to see his projected release date suddenly increase after the new regulations went into effect.

Don Specter, the head of the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office that advocates for inmates, said his office has heard from “many” inmates complaining that their release dates suddenly have changed to increase their sentences by months or more than a year.

Daniel Lee, an inmate awaiting release from a male community re-entry program in Los Angeles, said Tuesday that his projected release date was supposed to have come last month.

“I was supposed to be released on June 20, and a week before my release they pushed my release date out 8½ months,” Lee said. “There’s actually a few people here where they added a year to their sentence, and some went back to prison.

“It’s just crazy. Like, if they could give us any type of assurance or reason why this is happening it would be a little easier to swallow the bad news.”

Lee, 27, was listed in online records Tuesday as having a projected parole date in January 2022, although he said later that he had been told that was changed.

“So they fixed my date this morning,” Lee said. “I’m at Sept. 11th now, exactly 60 days.”

Corrections officials have said they are working to correct errors in projected release dates, and they argued in court filings that being forced to return to the old system would be “extremely costly.”

The judge noted that CDCR had no estimate of the actual cost, but wrote that “requiring CDCR to return to its pre-May 1 credit calculating process would require the expenditure of significant employee and/or contractor time to create a new computer system (estimated at months of work) and to manually calculate credits for approximately 76,000 inmates.”