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Page Number: 88.0

14 

BROWN v. PLATA 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

free.  Although  efforts  were  made  to  release  only  those 
prisoners  who  were  least  likely  to  commit  violent  crimes, 
that  attempt  was  spectacularly  unsuccessful.    During  an
18-month  period,  the  Philadelphia  police  rearrested  thou-
sands of these prisoners for committing 9,732 new crimes. 
Those  defendants  were  charged  with  79  murders,  90
rapes,  1,113  assaults,  959  robberies,  701  burglaries,  and 
2,748  thefts,  not  to  mention  thousands  of  drug  offenses.9 
Members of Congress were well aware of this experience.10 
Despite  the  record  of  past  prisoner  release  orders,  the
three-judge  court  in  this  case  concluded  that  loosing
46,000  criminals  would  not  produce  a  tally  like  that  in
Philadelphia  and  would  actually  improve  public  safety. 
Juris.  App.  248a–249a.    In  reaching  this  debatable  con-
clusion,  the  three-judge  court  relied  on  the  testimony  of
selected experts, id., at 248a, and the majority now defers
to  what  it  characterizes  as  the  lower  court’s  findings  of
fact  on  this  controversial  public  policy  issue,  ante,  at  15, 
19–20, 24. 

This  is  a  fundamental  and  dangerous  error.  When  a 

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9 Hearing on Prison Reform before the Senate Committee on the Ju-
diciary, 104th Cong., 1st Sess., 49 (1995) (statement of Lynne Abraham,
District  Attorney  of  Philadelphia);  Hearings  before  the  Subcommittee
on  Crime  of  the  House  Committee  on  the  Judiciary,  104th  Cong.,  1st
Sess., 259 (1995) (same); see also Hearing before the Subcommittee on
Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security of the House Committee on
the  Judiciary,  110th  Cong., 2d  Sess.,  31  (2008)  (statement  of  Sarah  V.
Hart,  Assistant  District  Attorney,  Philadelphia  District  Attorney’s 
Office).

10 Condemning  the  inappropriate  imposition  of  prison  population
caps,  Senator  Sarbanes  cited  “the  case  of  Philadelphia,  where  a  court-
ordered  prison  cap  has  put  thousands  of  violent  criminals  back  on 
the city’s streets, often with disastrous consequences.”  141 Cong. Rec. 
26549  (1995).    Senator  Abraham  complained  that  “American  citizens
are put at risk every day by court decrees . . . that cure prison crowding 
by  declaring  that  we  must  free  dangerous  criminals  before  they  have
served  their  time.”    Id.,  at  26448.    “The  most  egregious  example,”  he 
added, “is the city of Philadelphia.”  Ibid.