California's Prison Problem

This week a federal judge threw down the gauntlet and demanded that California devise a solution to prison overcrowding within six months. This is some serious pressure.

SACRAMENTO — A federal judge Monday told the Schwarzenegger administration to act immediately to ease prison overcrowding or face the prospect of a court-imposed population cap.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton said that if substantial progress is not seen within six months, he will give lawyers for inmates what they seek: the appointment of a three-judge panel to consider limiting prison admissions.

The lawyers, representing inmates in a long-running lawsuit over mental health care, were disappointed by Karlton's order. Donald Specter of the Prison Law Office said state officials have had ample time to address the crisis and that only a population cap would provide immediate relief.

"There is no doubt in my mind that we will be back here in six months and the problems will only be worse," Specter said.

The Governor tried a stopgap maneuver by allowing prisoners to be voluntarily shipped out of state. That yielded a whopping 80 transfers out of the 173,000 inmates in the prison population.

Over at Calitics, Erik Love explains that this is not a new problem, just one that had to get to a crisis point before anybody decided to do something about it.

Given the dire state of the prison system in California, it's no surprise that one of Arnold's top promises in 2003 during the Recall election was to provide prison reform. Sure enough, on his second day in office, Arnold appointed a tough new leader of the department of corrections, and stated that "Corrections should correct." It seemed that serious reform of the prison system was soon to follow.


Instead, little changed in the three years that followed. The prison system got even worse. But, during his 2006 reelection campaign, Arnold again stated that prison reform would be at the top of his agenda for his new term. This time, Arnold gave some specifics. Schwarzenegger:


Promised to create a new program to help people released from prison find counseling and life-skills training.
Promised to build two new prisons using "lease-revenue" bonds.
Promised to hire more correctional officers, to essentially make the bloated prison system even bigger.
Promised to use private prisons - for-profit, non-state facilities - to house some people sentenced in California.

Pretty much nothing was done on these promises until the 2006 election campaign. And Erik rightly points out that the real problem is the sentencing system, which is entirely too punitive and has led to the overcrowding. In fact, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in a split ruling. As Erik says:

Changing California's unreasonable sentencing laws must be step one in any real effort at reform. Far, far too many people in California prisons are there for non-violent, victimless crimes like simple drug possession. The "three-strikes law" means that many people end up sentenced to decades behind bars for trivial offenses. Experts predict that if sentencing guidelines are left unchanged, the prison population in California will increase even further over the next five years to the tune of 21,000 more people. This rate is astronomical and will defeat any prison-building plan. California can do better.

As Byron Williams writes, we have preferred to lock away our problems with the prison system the same way we lock away our prisoners. There is no focus on rehabilitation, education, and particularly drug treatment. Drug addiction is an illness and demands treatment rather than incarceration. The extreme amount of nonviolent offenders in prison will come to a head in six months, when actual violent criminals will be turned out onto the street. This is a failure of leadership from a governor who has been disinterested in the problem for too long (unless it's election season), and is pulled in the direction of the reactionary Republican base, who are concerned only with retribution. Maybe they can do some conversions to change their attics and basements into jails, because otherwise there's nowhere to put these people.

We cannot have inmates in cots and hallways and living on top of one another like some kind of vermin. There needs to be some sanity brought back to the process. It's shameful that a federal judge has to push it to this level to wake up Sacramento.