California Downsizes $8 Billion Prison Plan
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California corrections officials informed state lawmakers they will cut at least 6,900 beds from the state’s $8 billion, 53,000-bed prison construction plan due to planning delays and increased construction costs.
The revised plan emerged during a state Senate Public Safety Committee hearing on the progress of Assembly Bill 900, which allocated $7.9 billion to ease overcrowding, expand capacity and improve conditions at state prisons, county jails and community re-entry facilities throughout California.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bi-partisan group of state legislators pushed through AB 900 in May 2007 as a panacea to ease the state prison crisis under the threat of federally mandated population caps and federal management of California’s prison system.
The CDCR houses more than 170,000 inmates at prisons designed to accommodate approximately 85,000 inmates. The prison overhaul will deliver fewer beds and take longer to implement, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The portion of the plan to expand capacity at existing prisons by 16,000 beds will be downsized to 13,000 beds, according to testimony at the hearing. Each bed will cost $222,000, almost 50 percent more than initial estimates, officials say.
A legislative provision to help create more beds at county jails will fund approximately 60 percent to 70 percent of the 13,000 beds initially proposed, officials say.
Officials will also downsize the plan’s re-entry component, which authorized construction of 16,000 new beds at 32 new community-based facilities dispersed throughout the state. Officials did not provide an estimate of how many re-entry beds will be cut.
The more than $1 billion allocated toward prison healthcare beds will not be sufficient to provide the 8,000 beds called for in AB 900, officials say. However, California Prison Health Care Receivership Corporation administrator J. Clark Kelso has the authority to mandate additional spending for the state’s prison health system, which has been under court-ordered federal management since June 2005.
One year after lawmakers enacted AB 900, the expansion program remains in the planning phase. The first new beds are scheduled to come online in December 2009 — 11 months later than initially scheduled, officials say.
The initial plans were revised to meet demands for the replacement of some of the proposed dorm housing with more cell units and to account for the failure to include sufficient space for healthcare services and rehabilitation programs, officials say. The revisions caused significant delays in the planning process resulting in increased construction costs.
The Legislature’s insistence on employing state agencies in the design process rather than allowing private contractors to design and build new projects further contributed to costly delays in planning that are driving increasing construction costs, officials say.
Infrastructure constraints preventing expansion of some existing facilities also forced planning revisions and contributed to delays in implementing the prison construction plan.
AB 900 also authorized the transfer of up to 8,000 inmates to out-of-state facilities. Fewer than 3,000 inmates have been transferred to other states, officials say.