Pubdate: Sun, 16 Aug 2009
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2009 The Washington Post Writers Group
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Neal Peirce

PRISON SPENDING HITS A BRICK WALL

In a season of deep deficits and alarming program cuts, why aren't 
states more seriously focused on reducing their swelling prison populations?

The Vera Institute of Justice reports unusual progress - 22 states, 
pressed by recession, reluctantly starting cutbacks. But with a 
world-leading 2.3 billion people behind bars, the United States has a 
long, long ways to go.

California's case is extreme - but illustrative. In the mid-1970s, it 
was jailing 20,000 offenders. Today the total is 168,000 inmates - an 
increase of 740 percent. In 1999, its prison system cost an already 
massive $4 billion to operate.

Now, with more prisoners, more penitentiaries, more guards, more 
health costs, the budget figure has topped $10 billion - a big 
contributor to the $26 billion state budget shortfall.

And the money is producing more horrors than cures. After 14 years of 
lawsuits by inmates alleging cruel and unusual punishment, a 
three-judge federal court panel on Aug. 4 ordered California to 
reduce its prisoner roll by 43,000 inmates over the next two years.

The state, the judges wrote shortly before a major riot at a prison 
in Chino, has created a "criminogenic" system that actually pushes 
prisoners and parolees to more crimes through "appalling," "horrific" 
prison conditions:

"Thousands of prisoners are assigned to 'bad beds,' such as 
triple-bunked beds placed in gymnasiums or day rooms, and some 
institutions have populations approaching 300 percent of their 
intended capacity.

In these overcrowded conditions, inmate-on-inmate violence is almost 
impossible to prevent, infectious diseases spread more easily, and 
lockdowns are sometimes the only means by which to maintain control. 
In short, California's prisons are bursting at the seams and are 
impossible to manage."

Mentally ill inmates are left without access to health care, said the 
judges, noting that in the last four years "a California inmate was 
dying needlessly every six or seven days."

California's fiscal crisis has already led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger 
and legislative leaders to agree to cut $1.2 billion from the prison 
budget. They haven't agreed how, though discussion includes reducing 
prison rolls by up to 37,000 through early releases and revised 
parole practices.

Already, California's increasingly ideological Republicans are 
opposed; Assembly Leader Sam Blakeslee talks darkly of "letting out 
some very dangerous criminals onto our streets and into our neighborhoods."

And it isn't just Republicans who resist significant reform - it's 
California's powerful "prison-industrial complex."

Last autumn, the reformist Drug Policy Alliance Network and its 
allies put a Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act on the ballot. 
Supported by a wide range of treatment officials and former 
high-ranking corrections officials, it focused on non-prison 
treatment for nonviolent drug offenders plus good time credits for 
inmates and fewer arrests of parolees for technical violations. 
California's high recidivism rates would be curbed and billions in 
new prison construction forestalled, the advocates claimed.

But California's prison guards union (with 2,000-plus members earning 
over $100,000 a year) didn't like the idea of fewer inmates (and jobs).

So with other pro-prison forces, it mounted a $3.5 million television 
advertising campaign in opposition. California's political 
establishment fell into line including Schwarzenegger and former 
governors such as present Attorney General Jerry Brown (a likely 2010 
gubernatorial candidate). The measure lost resoundingly.

In contrast to California's folly, New York state has actually 
reduced its prison rolls by 10,000 in the last decade. How?

By relying heavily on the types of alternative treatment for 
nonviolent offenders that California spurns. And just this year, New 
York finally repealed the infamous "Rockefeller drug laws" that 
helped swell its prisons with minor offenders serving long terms.

Now California reformers are pushing a "People's Budget Fix" formula 
they say would save at least $12 billion over the next five years. It 
includes a claimed $5.5 billion through community-based addiction 
treatment for minor drug offenses (proposed by the Drug Policy 
Alliance Network).

Another $1 billion a year, it's claimed, could be saved by limiting 
three-strikes penalties to violent crimes (not just shoplifting or 
simple drug possession). Emptying Death Row by converting 
California's current capital sentences to life without possibility of 
parole - an American Civil Liberties Union proposal - would 
reportedly save $1 billion over five years.

Another $1 billion, it's claimed, would come from closing 
California's dysfunctional youth prisons and shifting responsibility 
to local programs with successful track records.

Such rational reforms - increasingly echoed in states nationally as 
the fiscal grinder minces budgets - were needed long before the 
current recession. They'll be important long afterward.

When, as a society, we take these rational steps, we'll not just save 
dollars. We'll also start to spare the horrendous human waste and 
harm to families of knee-jerk law-and-orderism that can't discern 
between deep and serious criminal behavior and the missteps, usually 
in youthful years, that most societies deal with far more calmly - 
and effectively. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake