More Construction... This Time, in California

In the heels of the report from Michigan come two new construction projects within California, both funded by AB 900. In Calaveras County, the local jail's capacity is to be quadrupled. And the expansion in San Bernardino adds maximum security beds.

Unsurprisingly, the Republican Caucus has been following on the progress made with AB 900 funding. From their perspective, "[i]t does not help that CDCR seems to have little direction and produces a new strategy plan on an annual basis. In the meantime, Democrats are pushing policies through the legislature – and supported by the Governor – that decrease the population through early release and place the burden of monitoring and controlling these individuals on local entities. Sadly, these are the exact same policies and actions that AB 900 was supposed to prevent."

From an empirical perspective, however, it is the massive construction of more prison cells that should be prevented. Building prisons is akin to building public highways; as we build more to prevent congestion, congestion gradually increases to fill the volume available. It is frightening to think that incarcerating one in 100 Californians is not enough. But perhaps they are the "wrong" kind of Californians, and therefore the Republican caucus should lose no sleep over them.

In any case, these new construction projects highlight the dark and problematic side of the Plata/Coleman decision. In an effort to be courteous to the state, and not to micromanage its affairs, the three-judge panel asked for a population reduction without mandating methods the state might employ to achieve such reduction. In his response to SCOTUS Justices, Don Specter seemed to agree that building new facilities would be among the range or responses that would be in compliance with the order. I actually think a narrow interpretation of the Plata/Coleman order is not only possible, but reasonable. The court did use the word "reduction" and stated a number of inmates. To say that "reduction" is the same as "dilution" of inmates is a bit of an interpretive push. But the real point is, of course, that building new prisons, in the long run, will push California away from compliance with the order, because the new facilities will, in due course, become just as overcrowded as the old ones.

Michigan: Preparing a Prison for California Inmates

(image courtesy Cory Morse from the Grand Rapids Press)

The Michigan dream, which encountered some serious hurdles before getting back on track, is apparently becoming reality. Via Sara at the Prison Law Blog, here are some details about the preparations to receive California inmates at this new Michigan facility:

As The GEO Group Inc. prepares to reopen the site once known as a “punk prison” for youth convicts, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is getting ready to send nearly 2,600 inmates here to help solve the state’s prison overcrowding.

This time, the inmates will not be deviant youth, but adults who ran afoul of California law for a variety of reasons.

The prisoners coming to Baldwin as part of a $60 million-a-year contract with GEO will be medium-security inmates deemed not extremely dangerous. Still, their backgrounds may include everything from murder to sexual assault.

Michigan has been hailed as a model for inmate population reduction. Apparently, these commendable steps have put them, and GEO corporation, in a position to benefit from our failure to act similarly.

A Surprising Voice Against Mandatory Minimums and Criminalization

"Tough on crime, tough on crime, lock 'em up! This is how these guys ran, but it isn't working! . . . We're locking up people who take a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know we lock them up for ten years. . . Judges say there's nothing we can do, we got these mandatory sentences. . . They go in as youths, they come out as hardened criminals..."

Bipartisanism reaches new surprising heights with this surprising little Pat Robertson video clip. Happy Holidays!

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Many thanks to Billy Minshall for this bit of holiday news.

Merry Christmas, Taxpayers

After a conference and travel hiatus, CCC returns to a semi-regular posting regimen. And what better than a post on California Watch, according to which, despite the fee hikes in the UC system, "on a per-capita basis, UC is still cheaper than another big and expensive component of the California state bureaucracy – the prison system."

We've posted in the past about the gubernatorial problematic effort to create legislation that curbs prison expenditures in relation to educational expenditures. We also reported on the correctional angle to student protests of fee hikes. Here's hoping that 2011 will be a year that continues the nascent trend of decrease in incarceration rates, and as a result, incarceration expenditures.

The Fight Over Preston Youth Correctional Facility

On occasion, we have covered the abysmal state of juvenile prisons in California. Since our juvenile prison population has been declining, Some of them, like the juvenile institution in Chino, have been closed and repurposed into adult incarceration facilities. The Books Not Bars project at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights lists some of the atrocious occurrences in these institutions:

• Young people locked in 20- to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement for days, weeks and months on end;
• Young people locked in 4'x4' cages for temporary detention;
• Guard and staff abuse, neglect, manipulation, and humiliation of the young people in their care;
• Rampant sexual assault;
• Guard/staff abuse of chemical weapons against the young people;
• Virtually non-existent care for young people with mental health or substance abuse needs;
• Shocking negligence in medical care, especially emergency care;
• Woefully inadequate educational programming;
• A culture and atmosphere of constant intimidation, isolation, fear and violence;
• Five deaths of young people in less than three years.

Their report states,

Stark and Preston youth prisons are the most severe examples of the DJJ’s continuing failures, where daily chaos prevents most youth from participating in programs. Even where programs are administered with regularity, almost no programming proven to reduce recidivism is available, and at many prisons, only a small minority of youth participates. The DJJ has so dramatically failed to comply with court-ordered remedial plans that in 2008, plaintiffs sought a receiver to take over the reforms.

Today's Chron article is about one of these most notorious juvenile facilities, Preston Youth Correctional Facility. And, it appears that the hurdle in the path of doing the right thing and closing Preston is a lawmaker concerned about job losses among her constituents.

Preston, located an hour northeast of Stockton, houses just 224 youths and, as one of the state's oldest correctional facilities, is in terrible condition. Most of the youths serving time there are hours away from their families.

The facility employs about 450 people in a county with just 38,000 residents and a 12.4 percent unemployment rate. Closing it would save the state $30 million this fiscal year and more in future years, officials estimate.

"It's like closing a military base," said Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office. "People want to keep it just for jobs, but that shouldn't be the reason that the state or government implements a program."

Huber's arguments against the closure are as follows:

Huber said the closure of Preston would "kill an entire county," because it is one of the largest employers in the area.

"This is going to turn the city of Ione into Flint, Mich.," Huber said, referring to the depressing impacts the closure of General Motors facilities had on that company town 20 years ago. "I'm not disagreeing with the fact that a facility needs to be closed ... the question is how do we decide which is the best facility to close."

Huber contends that Preston has higher graduation rates than other youth facilities; is best complying with the settlement that came out of the 2003 lawsuit; and, because of its dorm settings, offers a better setting for youths.

"The five facilities we have are like a school district," she said. "I think Preston is the best school - if you have to save $30 million, do you close the best-performing school?"

I recommend reading the entire article - it provides more information on Preston, quoting references to it as a "dungeon".

The Crime of Punishment in California: NYT Editorial

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an editorial on the California correctional crisis, apropos the Plata/Colemen arguments.

At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.

Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.

Jonathan Simon writes in Governing Through Crime:

For the Court's "liberals", the staggering portrait drawn by the many experts who testified before both original courts and the 3-Judge panel of the way physical and mental health needs are unmet appears to have broken through their own instincts to defer on criminal matters. The routine way in which California prisoners met death not through lethal injections, but by fatal neglect of their obvious and remediable medical needs, or by suicide after florid psychotic symptoms were ignored, animated a livelier questioning of the state in a criminal matter than in a long time. The Court's "conservatives", stripped of their preferred grounds of deference to the state's penological rationality, by the sheer scale of California's organizational failures over a twenty year period, were left to rest on the primal fear of violent crime and the biblical conviction that keeping people locked up must mean fewer crimes. Of course even if the Supreme Court (5-4), upholds the population cap, it will not end mass incarceration, that claim was not yet before the Court (and probably never will be).

Sobering words.

LA Times favors parole for youth LWOPs

Today's LA Times carries this piece: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-1208-sara-20101208,0,2931752.story subtitled, "Sara Kruzan's case shows why juveniles should not sentenced to life without parole."

The Times had previously written in favor of Sen. Yee's narrowly-defeated SB 399 to change this policy statewide; today's Times asks Governor Schwarzenegger to offer clemency, if only in this one extreme case.

My favorite quotes: "She has volunteered for dozens of rehabilitation programs and won awards for her participation and attitude. ... The CYA felt that she should have been prosecuted as a juvenile rather than as an adult, which would have put her into a rehabilitation program from which she could have been freed by age 25 — seven years ago."

Sentenced a minor to life behind bars with no chance of parole is a ghastly, inhumane, cruel practice.