Prison numbers could go down soon

The state of California worked at it, worked at it, worked at it, and finally, they did it. On Monday, the way inmates are jammed into prisons was found to meet the constitutional definition of cruel and unusual punishment. One achievement was to have nearly twice as many inmates as the prisons were designed to hold, and the amazing thing is that they had pulled this off despite building a new prison every year or so. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, has ordered that inmate numbers be thinned by 33,000 or so. One way to do this is to release some of the prisoners that have been sentenced to unduly harsh terms under the three strikes law - this means that if you receive a felony conviction in certain jurisdictions and you already have two or more priors, you could go to prison for 25 years or more, and this rubbish can lead to some rather unjust sentences; one example was a guy from southern California who got 50 years in prison just for stealing some videotapes when a more reasonable term would have been just one year.