States Can't Afford Prison System Boom

NEAL PEIRCE

August 12, 2009

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 the recession, are reluctantly starting cutbacks. But with a world-leading 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States has a long, long way to go. California's case is extreme, but illustrative.

In the mid-1970s, it had about 20,000 offenders behind bars. 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 and 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 rolls 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 pushes prisoners and parolees to more crimes through "appalling," "horrific" prison conditions:

"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 past 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

But California's prison guards union (with 2,000-plus members earning more than $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 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 past 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 savings through community-based addiction treatment for minor drug offenses. Another $1 billion a year could be saved by limiting three-strikes penalties to violent crimes (not just shoplifting or simple drug possession).

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.

• Neal Peirce is a syndicated writer in Washington.