Judges to Decide Whether Crowded California Prisons Are Unconstitutional.

Faced with chronically packed prisons and a federal mandate to improve medical and living conditions, a three-judge panel is meeting here to decide whether the overcrowding results in unconstitutional treatment of California's more than 150,000 inmates. If so, the judges could order the state to release tens of thousands of prisoners. ''We have a motion today to exercise a very serious order which interferes in a profound way with the state's right to run its own affairs,'' one of the judges on the panel, Lawrence Karlton of Federal District Court, said in a hearing last week. ''And on the other hand, we have a serious failure of the state to provide adequate care.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]