The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The construction plans became law last year under Assembly Bill 900, which promised a total of 53,000 new beds. The reconfigured plans may require millions more in funds that have yet to be allocated.

Senate Public Safety Committee Chair Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, said in an interview the figures reaffirm her position that AB 900 "was the wrong policy for the wrong reason."

"You can't get past the $222,000 per bed figure," she said. "There is black and there is white, and $222,000 per bed, I don't care how you divide it, that is a staggering, overwhelming cost to the taxpayers."

Republican committee member Sen. Dave Cogdill of Modesto said AB 900 backers proffered the plan last year as a way to keep the state from releasing inmates early. He expressed frustration that it is getting delayed and downsized at the same time the administration is trying to release 22,000 prisoners early.

"We moved ahead quickly last year on approving one of the largest bond issues in the history of the state in order to deal with our overcrowding crisis," Cogdill said during Tuesday's 2 1/2 hour hearing. "Instead, what we've got is a plan that moves it off by 20 months ... and the only solution we've been offered is to let people out of jail. That's not acceptable, not only to the Legislature but to the people of California."

At Tuesday's hearing, corrections construction chief Deborah Hysen laid out the reasons for the added costs, smaller size and lengthier timeline on the program. Among them: revised plans calling for more cells instead of dorms, a failure in the initial planning to include enough space for rehabilitation programs and health care [editorial insert: Some of you might remember that AB900 was and still is touted as the prison expansion that will allow the CDCR to really implement Rehabilitation, yet somehow the CDCR planners neglected to include programming space in the new cellblocks], and infrastructure problems that prevented expansion at some of the prisons.

The Legislature, she said, added to the delays because it failed to allow private contractors to design as well as build the new projects, instead using state employees for design jobs.

Costs are expected to increase, Hysen said, due to contractors charging "what the market will bear."

AB 900's provision to help the counties build 13,000 more jail beds is in line for a bigger reduction than the bed program. C. Scott Harris, executive director of the Corrections Standards Authority, estimated that AB 900 will pay for only 60 percent to 70 percent of the beds envisioned, or 3,900 to 5,200 fewer.

"Things are much more expensive around the state," Harris said.

Meanwhile, the $1.14 billion AB 900 allocated for hospital beds won't be enough to build the 8,000 originally thought, according to J. Clark Kelso, the prison system's federal medical care receiver.

"My understanding is that all the players understood, you're not going to be able to build facilities for that many patient/inmates at that cost," Kelso said.

Kelso said he is now revising the hospital bed plan, but not to downsize it: He thinks he might need as many as 10,000 beds.

Officials also will downsize the "re-entry" program that initially called for 16,000 beds in 32 mini-prisons around the state, Hysen said. Corrections officials had touted the program as crucial to a long-term prison fix because of its emphasis on rehabilitation programming designed to cut California's worst-in-the nation 70 percent recidivism rate.

Copyright © The Sacramento Bee

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Plan to ease prison crowding falls short
DELAYS HAMPER PROGRESS; FEWER BEDS EXPECTED
By Edwin Garcia
Mercury News Sacramento Bureau
Article Launched: 02/20/2008 01:35:19 AM PST

SACRAMENTO - Prison officials acknowledged Tuesday that implementing the state's historic law to ease overcrowding will result in fewer beds than promised and take longer than anticipated.

The law, last year's AB 900, was supposed to provide 53,000 new beds over the next several years. But Deborah Hysen, the top official who oversees prison construction for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told the Senate Public Safety Committee hearing that they now expect only 50,000 new beds.

She and her boss, Secretary James Tilton, blamed faulty assumptions for the discrepancy. Hysen said her division was taking steps to produce better estimates in the future.

Committee members repeatedly expressed frustration with what they characterized as a lack of progress in building prison space, implementing educational programs and other reforms that the department has promised will relieve overcrowding.

"I think we're going to hear for some time, 'We're going to do, we're going to do, we're going to do,' " Committee Chair Gloria Romero said, "but it seems that we never really get to the 'we have done.' "

AB 900, which was passed by the Legislature without a public hearing, then signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was implemented at a time when federal judges were hinting that they could take over the prison system if the state didn't do something drastic to tackle the population crisis.

About 171,000 inmates are housed in 33 prisons built to hold about 100,000.

The law authorizes $7.4 billion in bond funding to create 53,000 beds for inmates in state prisons, county jails and re-entry facilities, and authorizes the transfer of up to 8,000 prisoners to cells outside California.

Ten months later, the beds are still in the planning stages, fewer than 3,000 inmates have been transferred and the court continues to seriously consider whether to take over the system.

Construction of the first beds, officials said, has been delayed and won't be available for another 20 months.

Tilton, who acknowledged "some bad schedules and bad estimates," tried nonetheless to keep the outlook positive by noting that one of the areas of most concern - the male adult prison population - has about 5,000 fewer inmates than in October 2006, which means fewer prisoners are being housed in gyms.

Tilton also said more parolees are being diverted into rehabilitation programs, instead of prison, when they test positive for drugs, which is helping to reduce the high rate of recidivism.

As a result of the recent, slight population dip, Tilton said, more inmates will be able to enroll in training and counseling programs behind bars.

"I'm excited about the fact that I'm not here, like I thought I'd be two years ago," Tilton said, "to say I'm out of beds."

Committee Vice Chairman Dave Cogdill, R-Fresno, said he was concerned that the delay, coupled with a reduction in the number of beds, and Schwarzenegger's proposal to release up to 28,000 low-risk inmates could have a detrimental effect on the public's safety.

"That's not acceptable," he said, "to not only the Legislature but to the people of the state of California."

The hearing was considered informational; the committee took no action.