The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The prison-industrial complex in California is troubled in many ways. The high costs come from our overly punitive laws and inadequate rehabilitation.

The United States incarcerates four times as many persons today as it did 30 years ago. We have more people in our prisons any other country, and much evidence points to injustice in sentencing and housing these people. Incarceration for drug use and sales, mandatory sentences without flexible sentencing by judges, "three strikes" sentencing, and pressure on parole boards to always say no, has profound economic and social impacts.

Moving San Quentin would be a catastrophe for the 5,200 persons presently housed there. The land reuse plans do not consider the abuse, struggle and exposure to
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violence that puts persons at great risk for incarceration, nor the needs and dreams that could release them.

As a pastor, I work to support and nurture communications between inmates and their children. Because it is in the Bay Area, San Quentin has become a nationwide model of volunteer services.

Seventy percent of all of the volunteers in the California State Prison system are here. California no longer funds rehabilitation, yet San Quentin prison has addiction recovery programs, self-help groups, education, job training, and spiritual formation groups because of its location.

Prisons in the Central Valley and other rural locations have essentially no classes or rehabilitative programs. Volunteers offer the chance not only of rehabilitation but of transformation to men who have had unbelievably difficult lives before ending up in prison.

They also make possible a successful transition back to normal life when an inmate is released.

"We can warehouse them anywhere," was a statement once made by former Marin Assemblyman Joe Nation in an IJ article discussing plans to move the prison to another site. If we "warehouse them," what kind of rehabilitation is possible?

Our urban location also means that families, including children can visit inmates. Continuity in relationships between inmate fathers and their children helps to protect children against the strong statistical possibility of them also becoming incarcerated as adults, and enhances the likelihood that the father will be successful in returning to normal family life after he is released.

The average household income in Marin is about $100,000. Are we so out of touch and out of care with those who have struggled without resources or opportunity that we cannot imagine their needs, their hopes, their dreams?

Do we need more bay views and a refined ferry terminal so badly that we can totally neglect the human consequences of fulfilling our desires?

Many people in Marin believe that we ought to do all we possibly can to rehabilitate those who have gone astray, to help them become safe and productive citizens, for their benefit and for our own.

Keeping San Quentin in Marin is one very valuable way to do that.

The Rev. Liza H. Klein is pastor at San Rafael First United Methodist Church.

http://www.marinij.com/opinion/ci_9548280