California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger declared another fiscal emergency, and proposed an $82 billion budget – three billion dollars below the barebones survival estimate of my economist friend.
Amidst all of the doom-and-gloom cuts, and the accompanying rage as the state that until recently epitomised possibility in America continues to implode, one policy change stood out, offering a glimmer of better priorities in the years ahead. Schwarzenegger called for a state constitutional amendment to ensure that the state never spent less than 10% of its general fund on higher education and never spent more than seven percent on prisons.
For years, criminal justice reformers and an increasing number of journalists have argued that California’s reflexive tough-on-crime policies were bankrupting the state. California has gone from having a prison population of fewer than 30,000 in the late 1970s to a prison population of about 170,000 today. It has passed laws such as “three strikes and you’re out” that have resulted in tens of thousands of men and women serving decades behind bars for relatively low-level third offenses. It has the country’s most dysfunctional parole system. It has a medical and mental health system for its prisons that is so awful the federal courts have declared them to be unconstitutional. It has a trade union for guards that, until a new leadership revamped it a couple years back, bludgeoned much of the political establishment to support prison-boom policies that served mainly to provide jobs and overtime pay to the guards rather than to promote public safety. And, despite a $10bn annual budget, the department of corrections and rehabilitation is so strapped for resources that it frequently has to triple bunk prisoners and, over the past year, has dismantled many of its drug rehab and vocational training programs.
At the same time as the state has gone on an incarceration tear, its support for higher education has shrunk, making a mockery of the half-century old Master Plan for Higher Education designed to guarantee access to the University of California system for the top 12.5% of graduating high school seniors, to make the second-tier state university system widely accessible, and to offer entry into community colleges to all remaining high school graduates.
When the incarceration binge began, California spent about $5 on higher education for every $1 on prisons. A few years back, that number approached parity. These days, shamefully, California spends more on prisons and corrections than on its state universities. In the last round of budget cuts, the University of California system lost nearly $1bn. Student fees have, as a result, been raised 32%, thousands of support staff have been laid off and professors across the system have been put on unpaid leave. The country’s most prestigious public university system now faces the humiliating reality of seeing universities across the country set aside special funds with which to poach disgruntled, underpaid, UC academics.
Given these realities, Schwarzenegger’s proposal is a hugely welcome priority shift. Yet, as the New York Times editorialised, the small print within this proposal is more a mark of cowardice than courage. How will Schwarzenegger rein in prison spending? Not by cutting the numbers of people entering prison. Not by using what little political capital he has left to urge reform of three strikes, not by investing in a community infrastructure of job training programs, drug rehab centres, mental health clinics or any of the other structures that could reduce criminality in the first place. Nor by pushing for system-wide reform of a parole system that functions mainly as a revolving door between prison, the free-world, and prison again.
Instead, Schwarzenegger has proposed widespread privatisation of the prison system – on the dubious grounds that private prisons can operate at lower costs than do state-run prisons – and huge reductions in the amount of money spent on medical and mental health services for prisoners.
On the first point: in states where private prisons have proven cheaper to maintain, that’s largely because they pay staff poorly, cut corners on training, and create job training, education, and drug rehab programs for prisoners that look alright on paper but have almost no credibility on the ground. It’s also because they cherry-pick which inmates to accept, leaving the state with the most dangerous, hardest-to-control inmates. That’s why few private prison companies are willing, or able, to run Supermax facilities – and why states such as Arizona, that have proposed wholesale privatisation in recent months, are running into heavy criticism from criminal justice experts who fear the consequences of handing the most dangerous prisons and prisoners over to cost-cutting privateers.
On the second point, the state’s record on providing mental health and medical services to inmates is already so bad that federal judges have handed control of those services over to a federally-appointed Special Master. Last year, a panel of judges found that prison overcrowding was contributing to unconstitutionally poor levels of medical care and it ordered California to find a way to reduce the prison population by almost 50,000.
So far, the state has shown a remarkable unwillingness to be bound by these federal rulings. Slashing the budgets for medical and mental health services will be a further slap in the face to the federal judiciary – and could, ultimately, result in a wholesale federalisation of the California prison system.
Like so much else about the last Schwarzenegger budget, this is a game of illusions. Schwarzenegger was right that California’s higher education versus prison priorities are entirely backwards at the moment. But he was absolutely wrong in his proposed solutions. Put simply, there’s no way to preserve California’s higher education institutions in an austerity era unless Californians are willing to fundamentally re-evaluate 30 years of ill-conceived, tough-on-crime politics. And that doesn’t mean cutting services for prisoners and paying those who guard them less; it means putting fewer people in prison in the first place, in some cases putting them in for fewer years, and finding more sensible ways to keep them on the straight-and-narrow than the threat of automatic revocation of parole once they return to their communities after their sentences are served.
Schwarzenegger’s belated realization that California’s fiscal priorities are messed up was welcome. I hope he’s now intellectually honest enough to take the debate where it needs to go. California is at a turning point. If it turns in the wrong direction on this crucial issue, the troubles of the state’s higher education institutions will only get worse and its prisons will only continue to be a national scandal.
