Fault Lines: California Prisons in Crisis
Critics Blast $8 Billion Prison Plan at California Symposium
Photos by Julia Dunbar, USF
SAN FRANCISCO — Several stakeholders in California’s correctional system criticized the planned $8 billion state prison system overhaul at a University of San Francisco School of Law symposium.
Nearly 200 people gathered at the symposium, Confronting The Crisis: Current State Initiatives and Lasting Solutions for California’s Prison Conditions, including state officials, corrections staff, academics and advocates.
In May 2007, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the state Legislature enacted Assembly Bill 900, which authorized $7.7 billion — matched by $300 million in local funds — to create up to 53,000 new infill, re-entry and medical beds at state prisons, local jails and community facilities during the next 10 years. The legislation also authorized the transfer of up to 8,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities.
“AB 900 is without doubt the lowest day in my professional career,” says Mike Jimenez, president of the 30,000-member California Correctional Peace Officers Association. “I don’t believe it represents a step in the right direction,” he says.
(Above) CCPOA President Mike Jimenez and former corrections commissioner Michael Jacobson (center) voice criticism of the state’s $8 billion prison plan. (Below) Joyce Hayhoe of the governor’s office defends AB 900 during the daylong symposium hosted by the University of San Francisco. |
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“The CCPOA does not want one more person in prison. Every dollar spent building a prison bed is one dollar that isn’t spent on a child,” Jimenez says.
In 2007, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals appointed a three-judge panel to decide whether constitutional rights violations in California state prisons are the direct result of overcrowding in the system.
Lawmakers crafted the bi-partisan prison system overhaul plan under threat of federal judicial intervention and a possible federally mandated prison population cap.
As the symposium gathered almost one year on from the introduction of AB 900, no significant funds have been spent, no new beds have been built and only a few thousand inmates have been transferred, according to reports.
Corrections officials recently testified to state legislators that the $7.7 billion plan would take years longer to implement and deliver at least 6,900 fewer beds. Gov. Schwarzenegger also recently proposed the early release of 22,000 state inmates.
“AB 900 is a miserable piece of legislation, a complete fiction that monstrously underestimates costs,” says Michael Jacobson, former corrections commissioner and former probation commissioner for New York City.
Although AB 900 authorizes the expansion of re-entry beds and rehabilitation programming to help inmates transition back into society, experts question the effectiveness of programming in a system operating at double capacity.
“Treatment and rehabilitation are impossible in a system as overcrowded as this,” says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
Panelist Joyce Hayhoe, the Schwarzenegger administration’s chief legislative spokesperson on state correctional affairs rejected the criticism of AB 900, which is focused on improving conditions, expanding programs and reducing recidivism.
Many of the new beds authorized under the measure will replace makeshift beds already in place at prisons, Hayhoe says. AB 900 authorizes up to 16,000 re-entry beds with mandated programming and up to 16,000 infill beds to replace substandard temporary beds at existing facilities.
The state is moving inmates out of gyms and day rooms, and making progress, Hayhoe says.
However, Jimenez says conditions at the state’s correctional facilities have not improved.
“Conditions are as dismal as ever; they’re horrific,” says corrections union president Jimenez. “It’s a systemic problem, for years the whole system has been neglected and correctional staff don’t know what to do.”
“As long as staff are carrying notes to their families in their pockets as they go to work in case they never see them again, reform is not on the horizon,” he says.
In 2006, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson placed the $1.1 billion California prison healthcare system under federal receivership after the state failed to implement reforms outlined in a 2002 settlement agreement in one of two prominent class-action lawsuits concerning state prison conditions — Plata v. Schwarzenegger (medical care) and Coleman v. Schwarzenegger (mental health care).
Finding that one state prison inmate was dying every seven to 10 days due to medical neglect, Henderson ruled that the state was in violation of the Constitution’s 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
“As an answer to litigation, constitutional violations and judicial requests for action, AB 900 does nothing to relieve the crisis in state prisons today,” says Michael Bien, plaintiff attorney in Coleman v. Schwarzenegger.
Although state sentencing laws and parole procedures have drawn criticism as primary factors contributing to the state prison overcrowding crisis, AB 900 does not contain measures to reform, revise or restructure the state’s sentencing or parole laws.
“The state has abdicated its responsibility to solve California’s prison problems in any meaningful way,” says Donald Specter, director of the San Quentin-based nonprofit Prison Law Office.
Specter and the PLO have litigated to protect the civil rights of state inmates for more than 25 years, including the Plata and Coleman cases.
Hosted by the USF Law Review, the daylong symposium featured four panel discussions that focused on California inmate litigation and federal intervention, AB 900 and sentencing and parole reform.
“If we don’t fix this overcrowding problem and fix it very soon, nothing else we, or the state, do will matter,” says Graig Haney, a psychology professor and research principal in the Stanford prison experiment of 1971.