Don't get mad at the Supreme Court if you didn't like its ruling on California's prison system; get mad at your lawmakers. All of them.

The justices upheld a lower court injunction requiring California to reduce its overcrowded prison rolls by at least 30,000 inmates, but it was a Hobson's choice.

The court was duty-bound to uphold the Constitution, which makes clear that you cannot house people in inhumane conditions and without fundamental medical care.

But the decision also affirms that which we hate most about our Legislature, and opens the door for more of the same: their pathetic inability, unwillingness and cowardice to govern.

That's what got us here today, and it goes well beyond today's batch of empty suits. This litigation has been ongoing for 20 years since a 1990 lawsuit first alleged that California prisons were denying inmates the minimally required level of mental health treatment.

The state has been in denial and resisted reform ever since, regressing as a result, and wasting billions in the process, all while we talk at cross-purposes amongst ourselves.

We demand tough-on-crime policy, yet our recidivism rate is 70 percent, highest in the nation.

We execute hardly anyone, but house 678 death row inmates at twice the cost of inmates in the general population.

We complain that the death row appeals process takes too long, but we refuse to fund public defenders to provide adequate legal counsel for death row inmates, thus providing justifiable grounds for appeal.

Until sanity prevailed to cut the project, we were prepared to spend $400 million on a death house for 678 inmates when we'd have been wiser to spend it improving medical treatment for 143,600 inmates which, if we had, would've kept us out of the courts long ago.

The vast majority of inmates don't have high school diplomas, are often illiterate or drug dependent or mentally ill, or have no job skills. Prison addresses none of those things because we refuse to spend money to do so. Yet we're incensed that inmates can't function in society when released, and ultimately reoffend.

Since three-quarters of inmates aren't doing long, hard time and eventually get out, does it make sense to deny them the rehabilitative tools that will help them stay out?

What is it we think is so magical about locking people up in cages for six or eight years thinking that will alter their behavior when we don't provide any treatment to help them alter it?

How many more years of 70 percent recidivism rates are needed to convince tough-on-crime advocates that the punitive penitentiary model is a failure, that we are investing $9 billion annually in failure?

We are so obsessed with keeping people in prison we refuse to develop creative ways to keep them from coming back.

Our goal when we catch somebody should be to make the victim whole and find a meaningful punishment consistent with guaranteeing that an inmate will not reoffend. Prison is not doing that.

So now we're planning to move early-release inmates from state prisons to county jails, yet the Legislature is taking money from the counties to pay the state deficit, while being unable to appropriate the money for the inmates they're going to dump on the counties.

And then we're told California improperly freed more than 450 dangerous inmates last year as part of this reduction process, while the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation disputes that and says it has its own version of the story, blaming it on computer errors.

Who ya gonna believe? This is the kind of dysfunction lawmakers have delivered to taxpayers over the last 20 years. They are to blame for Monday's court decision and they will most benefit from its dangerous precedent, as Antonin Scalia warned in his dissent, that forces judges "to engage in a form of fact-finding-as-policymaking that is outside the traditional judicial role."

The ruling provides institutional cover for lawmakers to keep passing the buck. I can just hear that elected official now: "Hey, there's nothing we can do; we have to do this because the court said so." No, you bonehead; it's because you did nothing for all these years that the court was confronted with the dilemma of having to defend the Constitution or legislate from the bench.

I dare say every public office holder involved in this matter knew this day would come.

The court's decision should be seen as an opportunity to overhaul California's entire penal system. Instead, it'll be used as yet another excuse for lax, lazy, incompetent, sound bite-loving lawmakers to sit on their heels and let courts and a broken petition initiative process set the rules of governance.

How sad it is that we have to go outside the Legislature to do the Legislature's job because lawmakers can't, won't and don't do it themselves.

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Bruce Maiman is a former radio show host living in Rocklin. Reach him at brucemaiman@gmail.com.

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