The High Cost of Prisoner Lawsuits to California Taxpayers

Already, Federal Receiver J. Clark Kelso has requested $70 million immediately and $3.4 billion in the next fiscal year to pay for prison health care facilities if lawmakers do not agree to borrow money to do so.3 While Kelso battles for money, a recent poll found that nearly half of California voters would favor cutting money from prisons and corrections over any other major area of state spending. It is in the context of the state’s budgetary woes that a critical eye should be placed on a great expense to California’s prisons: the legal fees it incurs as a result of lawsuits filed by prisoners. These lawsuits are a burden to our prisons and to our courts. While some lawsuits are justified, such as the lawsuits that identified the problems in prisoner health care that led to the installment of Federal Receiver Kelso, myriad other lawsuits delay the process for Californians who are not in prison, but rather awaiting justice from our already clogged court system. Many lawsuits filed by prisoners are minor grievances at best, which—if they have any merit at all—deserve only modest payments far less than the state’s cost to process the cases. At worst, these frivolous lawsuits amount to a very expensive taxpayerfunded hobby for prisoners while they await parole.