California: Prisons and Politics

Jennifer Warren writes in the LA Times today about two former prison officials who claim that the corrections officer's union and the governor conspired to stymie any efforts to fix California's condition-critical prison system. The officials claim that Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy was tasked with handling the labor contract between the prison guards and the state, and that top Schwarzenegger aides were willing to give the union whatever they desired in order to support them in the gubernatorial election (which they did not; they endorsed Angelides, but did not run the barrage of ads that were initially expected). The union was repotedly given veto power over the nominations to top posts in the corrections department (Union officials deny this). These paragraphs are indicative of the general tenor:

Beyond such events, (former Corrections secretary Jeanne) Woodford said she thought her agenda for the department — one that included reform of the parole system, more education and drug treatment programs for inmates, and a fresh look at who goes to prison and for how long — clearly was not popular with Schwarzenegger aides consumed with his reelection.

In April, Woodford said, she laid out her plan for sentencing reform and other changes to the governor, recalling that he responded, "That sounds reasonable." But, according to Woodford's testimony, Kennedy and Aguiar told him, "Governor, it's an election year."

Now, it should be noted that these two officials were testifying in federal court which is functioning as a kind of oversight hearing. Why this is happening in the judicial rather than the legislative branch is unclear. But certainly, Woodford and Roderick Hickman have a very good reaason to shift blame for the current problem: they're implicated in it up to their eyeballs. They were the corrections secretaries for the last few years. So I'm thoroughly unconvinced that the Governor was the only thing stopping that wonderful reform agenda that these two were oh-so-willing to implement.

But if you want to understand exactly what Arnold's plan is for getting out of this mess, it is clear that it bears no resemblance to the kinds of reform needed, and it will be a financial windfall for the corrections officers. He wants to build his way out of the mess:

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to roll out a plan next year that will call for about $10 billion in construction for prisons, jails and medical facilities, and include support for a sentencing commission, according to sources familiar with the proposal.

Sources said the breakdown on funding would allocate about $4.4 billion to prisons and re-entry institutions, $4.4 billion for county jail and juvenile beds and $1 billion for medical facilities to satisfy court monitors in two federal cases overseeing health care and treatment of the mentally ill.”

I'll cite Doug Paul Davis' take on this, as it aligns with my own.

We spend around $6 billion per year just on correctional facilities. Do we need improved prison facilities? By all means. But this is a question about budget priorities and the distribution of very scarce resources. The governor is threatening to cut money to the poor while additional money is going to correctional facilities.

The thing about correctional facilities is that they are a black hole. When you put money into education, you are making an investment--you are putting money into educating our youth now, so that they can be more productive. When you put money into health care, you are making an investment--you allow people to get medical treatment which allows them to live better and more productively. When you put money into prisons, you are throwing it into a black hole. It bandages the problem of having too many inmates, but it does nothing to prevent people from ending up in prison to begin with.

Prevention and saner sentencing (so the existing prisons aren't clogged with nonviolent offenders) are the formulae for reform. The Governor's proposal is a formula for an increasingly incarcerated society, where the focus is not rehabilitation and treatment but where to stash people. You cannot build your way out of the current problem. It's not possible.

As a tangent, the much-maligned (by me) LA Times editorial board deserves kudos for speaking straight on the death penalty and the Governor's reaction to Judge Fogel's verdict ruling the current lethal injection procedure inconstitutional.

That focus on propping up the death penalty is one problem with the governor's response to Fogel's decision. Another is that Schwarzenegger seems unwilling to entertain the possibility that what is really inappropriate about a civilized state's embrace of capital punishment — by lethal injection or any other means — is not the infliction of pain but the extinguishing of human life.

Contrary to Fogel's assertion in his opinion that the propriety of capital punishment is a matter for the Legislature, there was a time when judges took a broad view of whether the death penalty in its totality — and not just in a few botched executions — amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state death penalty laws then on the books. In a much-quoted opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said that capital punishment was imposed "wantonly and freakishly," adding that "these death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." The same is true, we believe, of the selective, even capricious imposition of the death penalty at the present time, whether or not the chemical cocktail administered to a prisoner is mixed in a way that minimizes pain. Tinkering with the machinery of lethal injection is only the beginning.

That's the kind of clear-eyed reason I don't expect from the editorial page. This adds fuel to the Courage Campaign's belief that California, and in the larger sense America, is coming around on the idea of what's cruel and unusual. I would add this into the proposal for building more prisons, which is heartless in the sense that it provides not for hope but for fear, and makes a society more terrifying rather than more purposeful and inclusive.