OPINION Last week's grim budget news from Sacramento reminded me of Edward Lorenz's often-quoted maxim, according to which the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas. California's budget, which we have consistently ignored and abused since the passage of Proposition 13, turns out not to have been limitless. And many residents, for whom our prison system had been invisible, may have found out for the first time that our correctional apparatus constitutes more than 7 percent of the state's annual budget. Perhaps we are finally ready to become aware of the impact of our prisons on our wallets — and our lives.
Californian prisons are at nearly 200 percent capacity; 170,000 people are kept behind bars, and many more are under parole or probation supervision. The prison medical system has been declared unconstitutional by the federal courts and handed to a receiver. Among the many reasons for this catastrophe are our irrational sentencing scheme, a collage of punitive voter initiatives approved since the 1980s, and our deficient parole system, which leads 70 percent of those released back into prison for largely technical parole violations.
Not only is this system inhumane and counterproductive, it's also expensive: it costs about $40,000 dollars a year to keep a prisoner behind bars, and much more to treat aging, infirm prisoners who are in the system due to legislative constructs such as the three strikes law.
The silver lining of the budget crisis is the opportunity to rethink our social priorities and reassess how we may transform them to make the system less expensive and cumbersome. The indications of this transformation are everywhere: the resuscitated debate on marijuana legalization (and taxation); prioritizing violence and public harm over other offenses; a reinvigorated public discussion regarding the usefulness, and costs, of the death penalty; avoidance of expensive prison expansions; the national crime commission initiative, propelled by the failure of the War on Drugs; and the California Sentencing Commission Bill, which will soon come before the Assembly for a third reading.
Californians may not be as punitive as voter initiatives suggest. When informed of the existence of prison alternatives and of their costs, the public tends to choose less punitive options. Our current mentality of scarcity presents, therefore, a remarkable chance to decrease the size of our inmate population. This would lead not only to immense savings, but also to the release of many people who don't belong behind bars. How we use this opportunity, however, depends on our ability to imagine, and implement, a new set of priorities.
We must understand that short-term, emergency measures of mass releases will be ineffective unless we use this opportunity as a catalyst to rethink our beliefs on corrections. Without a strong set of rehabilitative and reentry programs, many of those released under the new policy will return to the prison system. If we want to avoid more expenses, and a revolving prison door, we must reform and rationalize our sentencing regime to conform to sensible, fact-based principles, rather than political fads and panics.
Such measures are the flaps of the proverbial butterfly's wings, and if we act not only swiftly, but deeply and wisely, we may be able to escape the tornado.
Hadar Aviram is associate ...
As this article points out this economic crisis is finally providing a unique opportunity to bring the appalling prison culture to the attention of the public. This incarceration mania affects us all, not just economically. Our society is not safer because of the high incarceration rate, as law enforcement and politicians want us to believe. We are actually less safe. We need to spend our money on rehabilitation, drug treatment, mental hospitals and counseling for people with deviant sex drives so transgressions can be avoided instead of punished.
Have you wondered why private prisons can make a PROFIT charging this state HALF of what it costs to keep a prisoner in a California state prison? The prison guard union, who is blocking any sensible reform, is to blame. Why would you want fewer prisoners if you can earn more that the governor of our state, working overtime, with barely a highschool diploma.
Isn't it repugnant to lock up our children (18-24) for smoking a weed when our cornucopia is full and then say "Oops, sorry about that. We can't afford to destroy the foundation of your adult life as a citizen and human being anymore"? Or when, on the 3rd strike we judge without context?
It's all well and good to release half of our incarcerated citizens now that we can't afford them, but we've never even tried to rehabilitate them. What are 50,000 ex-convicts, whose education in criminal activity has been sponsored by the state for the length of their detention, to do?
We, as a society, have never had any intention to rehabilitate any of them. We shipped 'em off, locked 'em up, and paid our taxes to forget about them. Just imagine their gratitude, for us coming to our senses and realizing the error of our ways. If there is a lesson to be learned here, can it be learned?
What 50,000 jobs are waiting for these hidden citizens? Just two months ago in Oakland CA, one parolee took out 4 police officers in one day under the current 'parole system'. What moral, economic, technological [sic], solutions will allow for 50,000 instantly unemployed human beings on parole with criminal records?
We can not ask them to pick lettuce, because those jobs are taken. We can't ask them to be janitors because we won't trust them with our belongings. Manufacturing jobs are not available for any American regardless of criminal record. Service jobs require a much different skill set than the one we have sent them to prison to formalize. And finally, I doubt we can hand out 50,000 grammies, call 'em rappers and hope they shoot each other without some collateral damage.
50,000 human beings released into the wild after proving they don't rise to our level of what a human being should be. We will have to legalize marijuana just to keep as many sedated as possible.
There are no jobs. For them, for 10% of our neighbors or for ourselves, so we absolutely can not hold them to a standard we ourselves can not realize. What are 50,000 human beings to do when too many citizens without criminal records don't have enough to do?
Nothing. That's what they are supposed to do. Nothing. Just, nothing. They can't go to school because that's where we are going to keep, or get, our own employment and we can not afford to teach those that will never work. It's not even a question of morality, is it? It's just being economically pragmatic, right?
Please consider that these 50,000 people along with many older Americans will never work again. There simply will not be any jobs to fill where even so much as just their gravitational effect would be useful.
Keep in mind this is not a new debate, that this situation arises with every recession in mankind's history. Don't feel too bad that we will go back to our expensive (morally or economically?) ways and simply use the 'throw away the key' method again. Just concentrate on this day's restitution and plan for the best.
This statement alone shows your ignorance. The current lock em up and throw away the key has put thousands of first time offenders in prison. Some for crimes committed and some who are innocent, scared, have no support and receive substandard legal representation by over-worked Public Defenders who convince them that if they do not take a plea bargain they will be locked up for much longer. When judges are allowed to send court reporters out of the room and tell a defendant 'take the plea or get buried in prison' or a District Attorney tells a group of school children 'I can end your life with a stroke of my pen' - you know something is wrong.
It is time to change the current policies from vengeance to justice. A system that looks at each case on it's own merits instead of "rubber stamping" the sentences handed out. A first time offender should not be given the same sentence as a habitual offender. We need to go back to the theory of "innocent until PROVEN guilty" and stop badgering defendants to "take a plea".
There are many who are sitting in prison who are innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. Innocence projects throughout the country are freeing people who have spent years behind bars for crimes they did not commit. Why is the public not outraged that this can happen? It can happen to you or a loved one - I know - it happened to my son.
Since you seem to have this vast knowledge of prisons and their benefit to the public, then explain to me what good it does to throw people in prison who do not pose a threat to public safety? And what do you do with these offenders who are released, even more broken than they were when they went into prison. They are released with $200 and a bus ride back to the place they got in trouble originally. Marginalized to the point where it is difficult if not impossible for them to find a job and a place to stay.
Unfortunately parole doesn't see its job as being one of helping these people with re-entry, they seem to prefer sending 70% of them back to prison, mostly for technical violations such as being late to an appointment with their parole officer.
So Missiondweller, I will be waiting here for your 'expert opinion' since you know it all, you can tell us how to 'fix' the system- maybe by hiring more guards, eh?
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