Michael W. Bien

It's not a case so much as a career. Since 1990, Bien and his firm have pressed ceaselessly to reform mental health care for the 30,000 state prison inmates with serious mental illness. The litigation remains ongoing after having morphed into a much wider effort to reduce the inmate population from a peak of 190 percent of capacity in 2006, an overcrowding nightmare. Coleman v. Brown, 90-cv-00520 (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990).

"This has been the biggest case in our office and the central case of my career," Bien said. "We devote thousands of hours a year to this. And it's not like nothing has happened, of course, but now we're struggling to get to the finish line."

After decades of litigation, and a failed effort by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2013 to declare everything fixed in a bid to end federal judicial oversight of California's prisons, Bien said he and his prison administration foes and their lawyers are coming to terms. "We're in a friendlier mode now, working together to resolve the remaining issues."

Brown, on whose watch the case began during his first stint as governor, argued in 2013 that because the state prison population had shrunk to 145 percent of capacity, the federal judicial panel overseeing mandated reforms should go out of business. "He wanted those judges out of his hair," Bien said. They declined to go away after a series of trials, instead ruling that constitutional violations persisted.

An earlier roadblock was the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which decreed that judges cannot limit prison populations unless all other remedies have been tried unsuccessfully. That appeared to end Bien's attempts to link overcrowding to the state's inability to comply with more than 70 substantive judicial orders regarding suicide prevention, sufficient staffing of physicians and therapists, and other urgent inmate mental health care needs. But in 2006 Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state prison crowding emergency. "That became our Exhibit A, pretty good evidence that the PLRA standard had been met," Bien said.

After years of further court hearings, the federal panel told Brown to cut the population. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed. The state responded with its realignment initiative and other moves to shift many inmates to county jails. Pushing further, Bien and colleagues won psychiatric care for death row inmates at San Quentin State Prison, where suicide rates were 10 to 20 percent higher than average, and other tangible improvements throughout the sprawling prison system.

"Prison is never going to be a good place to deliver mental health care," said Bien, who with his staff visits lockups regularly to monitor reforms. "But we have come a long way."

— John Roemer