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CENTER ON JUVENILE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE PRESS ROOM | |
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| Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 54 Dore Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 | Tel: (415) 621-5661 | Fax: (415) 621-5466 |
Begining Monday, you'll hear a lot of scary stuff coming out of the state Capitol. That's the day Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called the Legislature to meet in special session to decide the future of California's prison system.
The governor wants to launch a new era of prison construction, with two new prisons (9,000 beds) and 15,000 new spaces at existing prisons. The governor has already begun beating the drums for his plan, and the noise will only get louder. Listening to all the sound and fury, you might conclude that California's crime rates were going up or that the state was imprisoning too few people.
Neither is true.
The fact is, California has a lot of good news on the subject of crime.
Crime rates -- measured in terms of crimes per 100,000 population -- have been consistently dropping since the early 1990s. Today, violent crimes have dropped to 1973 levels. Property crimes have dropped to 1967 levels.
Some of that decline is due to locking up violent, habitual criminals for more time. But the bulk of the decline is due to other factors: a greater commitment to community policing; a shrinking population in the crime-prone age group of 18- to 29-year-olds; a strong economy; the decline of the crack epidemic. Other states with much lower imprisonment rates than California also have seen declining crime rates.
So why is the governor calling for more prisons when crime has dramatically declined in California?
He says we need new prisons because California's population is increasing. But he's looking at the wrong numbers.
What he and the Legislature need to look at are California's state prison incarceration rates, which, like crime rates, are based on population.
In 1973, with a population of about 21 million, California had about 22,500 in state prisons -- an incarceration rate of about 100 per 100,000 population, a rate that remained about the same through the 1970s. Today, with a population of about 37 million, California has about 170,000 in state prisons -- an incarceration rate of more than 450 per 100,000.
A rate of 400 per 100,000 would give us a prison population of 148,000. A rate of 350 per 100,000 would give us a prison population of 129,500.
Our incarceration rates per 100,000 population in California have been at historic highs since the mid-1990s -- and in Schwarzenegger's time in office, they're creeping back up again, even though they're dropping in other states.
To put these numbers in perspective, consider this: The United States leads the world in incarceration rates and California ranks in the top half of states.
That large-scale imprisonment comes at a cost to society. In California, the corrections budget took 4.3 percent of the state's general fund in 1985-1986. Since then, its share of the budget has doubled. Last year corrections consumed 8.8 percent of the general fund.
These dry statistics hide a very real problem. Spending on prisons is crowding out spending on higher education, essential to the future prosperity and quality of life in our state. Soon, if our policies don't change, the corrections budget will be 10 percent or more.
Why have our incarceration rates gotten so high? You'll see in tomorrow's editorial that the rate is up largely because California has increasingly shifted low-level, nonviolent offenders to the state prison system. That system was intended and designed for violent, habitual criminals. But we are now filling state prisons with check forgers, perjurers, fraudsters, petty thieves and other low-level criminals who used to be handled at the local level.
The Legislature should resist the call to build more prisons. As we'll see in upcoming editorials, it is unnecessary and wasteful. It is a giant backward step -- pouring scarce resources into a big black hole with no end in sight.
There has to be a better solution -- and there is.
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