Prison overcrowding in Illinois is approaching the level reached in California, says Malcolm C. Young, attorney and criminal justice consultant at the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata gave California two years to reduce the number of prisoners by more than 33,000. The court found California's prison overcrowding so bad it was unconstitutional

One part of the solution for Illinois, Young says in a white paper on the overcrowding issue, would be to reinstate the old program of awarding prisoners time off their sentences for good conduct. This is known in Illinois as meritorious good time or MGT.

Reducing overcrowding has become even more important considering Illinois' fiscal crisis, Young says in his paper.

In an interview, he also pointed to a new study by the Vera Institute of Justice that found the total cost of Illinois' prisons in 2010 was more than $1.7 billion.

To grasp the overcrowding problem in Illinois prisons, Young said several practices needed to be understood:

• All but the most serious offenders in Illinois receive day-for-day credit for time served so that an inmate typically serves five years of a 10-year sentence.

• In addition, going back to at least the 1970s, the Department of Corrections has awarded extra, "meritorious good time" credits. Since the 1990s, inmates could gain a maximum of 180 days off their sentences with MGT credits. These credits were used to reduce prison populations.

• Thousands of inmates every year arrive in Illinois state prisons with only a short time still to be served in prison. This is because they were sentenced to only one or two years and they have already served much of that time waiting for trial in a county jail.

• With the practice that most inmates serve only half their sentences and with MGT credits used to further subtract from their sentences, many inmates arrive in Illinois prisons nearly ready to be released, Young said.

Before September 2009, the Department of Corrections had a custom of delaying the award of MGT credits until a prisoner had served at least 60 days.

But in the fall of 2009, in a program called MGT-Push, prison officials dropped the 60-day holding period with the result that some newly arrived inmates were released after they served little time in state prison, although Young said they may have served time in county jails.

When some of these newly released inmates at some point were rearrested for additional crimes, Young said MGT-Push became the subject of inflammatory and inaccurate news reporting and it became a political football in the 2010 gubernatorial election.

The result was that Gov. Patrick J. Quinn canceled MGT-Push. Soon thereafter, the governor suspended the awarding of all MGT credits to Illinois inmates, Young said.

"The impact on the prison population of suspending MGT was immediate and predictable," says Young's "White Paper: Good Conduct Credit in Illinois."

Illinois' prison population grew by 7.2 percent in 2010 to 48,418. Illinois added more prisoners than any other state in the nation.

Because MGT is still suspended, Illinois' prison population continued to grow and exceeded 49,000 in 2011, the paper says.

David A. Erickson of IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, a retired Illinois Appellate Court justice, has been highly critical of using MGT credits simply as a method to reduce prison overcrowding. "They used it as a way to manage population, not as a rehabilitative tool," Erickson said today.

Erickson was appointed to study MGT by Quinn. In his report in August 2010, Erickson said he found inmates did little or nothing to earn MGT credits in Illinois. And he said the Department of Corrections should reward only genuine good conduct.

Young's white paper points out that a second study of MGT credits by a Department of Corrections Working Group, also in 2010, found that if MGT credits were restricted to prisoners who "remained clear of serious infractions and met other requirements," 18,089 prisoners annually could still earn MGT credits.

With this sort of improved MGT program added to normal entrances and exits annually to and from Illinois prisons, Young's paper says the population of Illinois prisons could be reduced "by as many as 4,522 in the course of a year."

Quinn on his own authority could reinstate an improved MGT program, Young says in his paper, and the beneficial impact on overcrowding would be immediate.

Young is one of at least two attorneys at the Bluhm Legal Clinic studying prison overcrowding and what to do about it. Dominique D. Nong, formerly a staff attorney at the Alabama office of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is the other.

Nong is a Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Foundation Fellow. Young is a Soros Senior Fellow at Northwestern.

Both Young and Nong said they believe that law school clinics can help in the study of American prison overcrowding and its solutions.

"You have students who can do research on policy initiatives," Nong said. She asked what might happen if the five law schools in Chicago assigned students to work in courts and with public officials on "advocating for alternatives to incarceration.

"I think that could have an effect on the population and perhaps provide examples of things that work."