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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 |
Just when you thought California's 20-year prison construction boom was over, here comes another election season.
Gubernatorial candidates Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides are falling over each other to launch a new era of prison construction. This is bipartisan, equal opportunity pandering and fear mongering, with an obvious impetus. The prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), has $10 million to spend to help or defeat a candidate for governor.
How obvious is this link? Schwarzenegger recently told The Bee editorial board that Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez, a card-carrying member of the CCPOA, would be handling his prison bill.
Unlike the rest of his infrastructure package, Schwarzenegger intends to bypass voters to pay for his prison-building plan with revenue-payment bonds that don't require a vote of the people. The reason: The governor and legislators know that it will be tough to sell the public on paying to build more prisons.
Angelides has't said how he would pay for his plan.
But the main issue isn't financing. The main issue is that building more state prisons is the wrong way to fix California's prison system.
The last two decades should make clear that the problem isn't too few cells. In a little more than 20 years, California built 22 new prisons, beginning with California State Prison, Solano, in 1984, and ending with Kern State Valley Prison in Delano, which opened in June 2005.
Experts predicted that the end of the construction era would give California the opportunity to concentrate on actually "correcting" prisoners -- and not just warehousing them -- thus getting its terrible parole failure rate under control. Schwarzenegger and Angelides have chopped that new era off at the knees before it even began.
Schwarzenegger has called a special legislative session for Aug. 7. He wants lawmakers to authorize the building of two new prisons. He also wants to convert existing private community corrections facilities for low-level, nonviolent prisoners into what he calls "mini-prisons," meaning that all custody staff would now have to be CCPOA prison guards. This replicates all that is wrong with the current prison system. His plan for local re-entry facilities in urban areas is vague, at best.
Not to be outdone, Angelides proposed that on his first day as governor he would declare a state of emergency, convert two unused facilities in Stockton to adult prisons and build new prisons within three years.
In making their proposals, both Schwarzenegger and Angelides play on the public's fear of violent criminals. A bit of history and a few statistics about the state's prisons suggest that the overcrowding problem has little to do with violent criminals.
In the not-too-distant past, the state prison system was reserved for the most dangerous, violent criminals who had long sentences. The rest -- low-level, nonviolent offenders with sentences of 18 months or less -- were handled at the local level. No more.
Since the mid-1990s, California has had a relatively stable population of prisoners serving time for violent crimes -- 65,000 to 80,000 prisoners. Yet today we have nearly 172,000 prisoners crowding our prisons.
What is going on? Unlike the past, the vast majority of prisoners today are serving time for nonviolent drug-related and economic crimes or parole violations, a terrible waste of state prison resources.
Neither Schwarzenegger nor Angelides has answered obvious questions. Why do we have overcrowding in our prisons despite having built 22 new prisons? Why is the prison population growing when crime rates are decreasing? Neither has presented an analysis showing where the growth in prisoners is coming and what custody levels -- minimum to maximum -- are needed.
Neither has told the public the long-term costs of new state prisons.
If you add, for example, 10,000 new CCPOA prison guards at $100,000 a year each, you're talking $1 billion in new annual costs.
The corrections budget took 4.3 percent of the state's general fund in 1985-86. Last fiscal year it consumed 8.8 percent. With the new proposals, the sky's the limit.
California doesn't need new state prisons. The state needs to get serious about what to do with low-level, nonviolent offenders. The state needs sentencing reform that metes out long sentences to violent criminals and shorter sentences or alternatives for low-level, nonviolent offenders. It needs a more effective parole system. We need to invest in more county jail beds and other community alternatives for shorter-term, low-level, nonviolent offenders.
And, most important, California needs a governor who will stand up to the prison guards union -- especially in an election year. Instead, we have an incumbent and a challenger competing to see who can grovel most abjectly before the union and its political war chest.
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