The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Joan Petersilia, a nationally recognized authority on prison reform and a consultant to the state corrections department, described the plan for a wave of prison expansion that the governor released on Friday -- just as his reelection campaign gears up -- as unworkable, poorly thought out and out of touch with research that she and others have done in recent years on cost-efficient rehabilitation methods.

"I think anybody who understands the situation we're in has got to be mystified by this report," said Petersilia, who runs a state-funded institute on prison reform at UC Irvine. "It's looking backward, not forward."

Schwarzenegger released his plan just days after his Democratic challenger, Phil Angelides, issued his own general program for prison reform and expansion.

Angelides, whose program lacks many specifics, condemned Schwarzenegger for allowing the prison population to shoot up to record levels and for permitting services in the prisons, such as health care, to deteriorate dangerously.

The governor's plan focuses largely on the massive overcrowding, proposing spending at least $3.6 billion on rapid construction of new prisons and expansion of old ones as well as contracting with other states to incarcerate inmates who are also illegal immigrants.

Petersilia ridiculed the idea, in large part because, she said, it would probably not be possible to build the prisons fast enough to keep up with what is expected to be continuous growth in the inmate population. Prisons are at nearly double their capacity.

"The plan, to me, is a fantasy," she said.

Another penal expert, Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, in Oakland, said that over the previous several decades the state has expanded prison capacity 300 percent -- but at the same time the inmate population increased 800 percent.

The focus should be on treating and rehabilitating inmates so they stay out of prison, he said, rather than incarcerating them over and over. Other experts agreed.

"Pick any study done by any criminal justice expert in the last 20 years, and they will talk about sentencing reform, or parole reform," said Dan MacAllair, executive director of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. "This doesn't address any of that."

Schwarzenegger's acting corrections secretary, however, argued that the proposal did include efforts to make fundamental changes to the system.

"I can understand where some people are coming from -- when you look at the numbers, it looks like we're just building beds," said Jim Tilton. "But there are parts of this that represent real change."

Tilton said proposals to shift female inmates into community-based facilities and open other programs designed to provide job-training and other services to inmates about to be paroled were based on successful reforms other states had implemented.

Schwarzenegger's report approvingly notes Petersilia's work on planning programs for the reentry of inmates back into their communities after serving their sentences, and it says she was consulted by the governor's staff in preparing the report. Petersilia said she was asked for her comments but that any suggestion she had a hand in preparing the plan or supported it "would be a complete misread."

Schwarzenegger came into office promising major reforms in areas like parole. But many of those programs were gutted, and the inmate population has rocketed to nearly 172,000. According to Petersilia's research, more than 20,000 inmates are in prison because of minor parole violations, and they could be dealt with more efficiently through treatment or diversion programs.

The plan released Friday calls for building a wave of huge reentry centers where newly released inmates could receive extensive training and treatment near their homes.

Petersilia is a strong advocate of such reentry centers, and she said that California is way behind other states, such as Illinois, which have sharply reduced their recidivism rates through such programs.

But she said that the governor's proposal offers no clear way of choosing the best inmates for the program, and probably is unrealistic. Getting approval for what could be as many as 20 reentry centers in urban areas throughout the state -- with as many as 500 beds each -- could prove all but impossible because of community opposition.

Krisberg and Petersilia endorsed one of the governor's proposals, diverting many female inmates to smaller prisons closer to their homes.

But Petersilia said the governor's plan did not offer enough smart options for dealing with the needs of inmates. Well-tailored programs, she said, are the best guarantee that the inmates will not commit new crimes and jam up the state prisons.

She added, "This whole thing just looks like they pulled it out of the wind. I just thought we were beyond this."

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http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/11/PRISONS.TMP