The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Opening prisons to ease crowding seems logical, but it is part of a long history of misdirection and mismanagement by the corrections department. Consider the addition of "rehabilitation" to the department's new name.

As the new letterhead went up earlier this year, rehabilitation spending dropped by more than $40 million. At CDCR, "rehabilitation" begins with slashing rehabilitation funding.

This prison expansion plan comes from the playbook. The plan to solve overcrowding will, in fact, exacerbate it.

For 20 years, the CDCR and prison guard's union pushed California into the biggest prison expansion in history. The fact that we now can lock up 176,500 prisoners, more than any prison system in the country, strongly suggests that lack of prison cells isn't the problem.

The problem is that we send too many people to prison. Take parole, for example. Last year, California sent more than 58,000 parolees back to prison on "technical violations," meaning they were not charged with committing new crimes, but had missed meetings with their agents or otherwise violated one of their parole rules.

California sends parolees back to prison at twice the national average. We're so far behind the curve that the Bureau of Justice Statistics now calculates the national recidivism rate both with and without California.

The prison population is determined by bed space, not the other way around. "You build 'em, you fill 'em" is the first rule of prison economics and public-safety politics. Other factors matter, but at the end of the day, you can't put prisoners in beds that don't exist, and beds that exist don't go unfilled.

Simple addition

History shows that adding 2,000 beds will increase the prison population by that same number. The new Delano II prison's 5,000 new beds haven't dented the overcrowding crisis - and won't, in today's political climate. Back in 1880, the new Folsom State Prison was built to address overcrowding at San Quentin - and both are full to this day. The CDCR proposal jeopardizes public safety by squandering more dollars on prisons and adding to the stresses faced by the communities where prisoners come from.

The CDCR says that the failure of the "new parole model" is responsible for the population spike. But what really happened? For 18 months, the department dithered and deflected, refusing to implement the new model or explain why it couldn't. Eventually, Crime Victims United, a front group for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, slapped together a fancy attack ad campaign, giving the CDCR the out it was looking for.

The department phoned in the implementation of an ambitious reform, and then knowingly chose to return to a program that keeps the revolving door of prison whirling - and the prison population growing. The new parole model didn't have a chance to fail; it was sabotaged.

On top of all this, remember that this isn't good news for us in the Valley. Counties and towns without prisons grow faster than towns that get them and suffer fewer negative environmental impacts. The myth that prisons are economic drivers is just that - a myth. Look around us: at Delano, Chowchilla, Avenal, Coalinga, Wasco and others. If ever we had a boom that wasn't, the prison boom is it.

Add it up: The department yanked a promising alternative when special interests demanded it, blamed that alternative for the failures of the existing program and is now attempting a "solution" that has never worked in more than 120 years of the California prison system by giving millions to a private, out-of-state company under a cloud of ethical questions.

Effective policy

This situation won't change itself. We must demand a policy more effective than blind incarceration.

We need to give alternatives the political support, financial resources and benefit of time to begin to undo what the last generation of prison building has wrought.

Debbie Reyes is an organizer with the California Prison Moratorium Project, and La Union del Pueblo Entero.

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/valley_voices/story/11354136p-12100710c.html