Elmer Smith: Prison overcrowding: It's legal, but not humane

I'M LOOKING around my 12-foot-by-10-foot office, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in here with two other men.

Not two frat brothers or guys I grew up with. I'm talking about two strangers recently arrested on criminal charges.

It's even cozier than it sounds. One of the three gets to sleep in a plastic container on the floor next to one of those neat little porcelain or stainless steel space-savers in which the drinking fountain is attached to the toilet.

"A lot of inmates are kept on lockdown in these conditions for up to 20 hours a day," said Jonathan Feinberg, an associate of civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, whose firm filed suit this week on behalf of inmates in the city's prison system.

More than 2,000 of the city's 9,300 inmates are living three to a cell while city officials try to come up with a way to ease overcrowding without endangering the rest of us.

The action filed this week is the latest in a series of suits aimed at easing overcrowding and insuring humane and healthful conditions for inmates.

Prison overcrowding reached crisis levels in the '70s, prompting a federal court order that forced the city to release some prisoners. Chances of that happening again are remote.

Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a release can only be ordered after a three-judge panel rules that prison living conditions constitute cruel and unusual punishment and that there is no other way to relieve the overcrowding.

"Triple-celling in itself is not unconstitutional," said Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison, a former public defender who is working to rationalize the city's prison and prisoner re-entry policies.

"We do meet the national standards."

Tells you all you need to know about the national standards. The issue should not be what the law allows but what is humane.

You couldn't cage animals in conditions like this for long before some humane-society activists formed a torch-light rally and marched on the zoo.

Living conditions for prisoners falls fairly low on our list of priorities. Most of us figure if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

But most city inmates are not convicts.

"About 60 percent are pre-trial detainees," Gillison said. "About 500 people are there because they are too poor to pay the lowest bail."

The city has 60 days to respond to the suit. But the Nutter administration has been working on this problem for weeks. Louis Giorla, the city's new prison commissioner, has already issued a report that Gillison said he will release next week.

Gillison said that the city will likely extend contracts with neighboring counties that already house about 400 city prisoners at a cost of $100 to $120 a day. That's $10 to $30 above the daily cost to house them here.

They will also expedite the transfers of about 500 prisoners who are still in city jails even though they have been sentenced to state prisons.

"Those plus the 500 who can't make bail could reduce population by 1,000," Gillison said.

Which would do little more than to avert the latest crisis. With Commissioner Ramsey's plans to put another 300 patrol officers on the street, adding to the normal summer spike in arrests, prison populations could swell over the next few weeks.

But the Nutter administration is trying to get out in front of the problem.

"We do not want to spend money locking up people who are nonviolent just to perpetuate the illusion that that this will make us safer," Gillison said. "We have to have an understanding in criminal justice about just who needs to be here so that we're not always in this crisis mode.

"This administration is committed to handling people in connection with risk assessments," he said. "Public safety is a term people use to justify anything.

"We want to make sure that victims are at the table, too," Gillison said. "It's complex. But we've got to solve this.

"As things are now, prison costs are keeping everybody in lockdown." *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith