PRISON GAMES

California Can't Afford to Play Them Anymore

'Aging inmates add strain on state prisons," said the headline in last
Sunday's Reporter. It was affixed to an Associated Press report
detailing how the average age of California prisoners is climbing,
putting more pressure on the broken prison health-care system.

But it wasn't prison health-care that captured the attention of The
Reporter's editorial board, or the fact that the writer highlighted
the problem by focusing on a Vacaville prison. It was a single
paragraph describing why Louis Rodriguez - a 66-year-old inmate
struggling through the final stages of liver cancer at the California
Medical Facility - is even in prison.

"He is serving a life sentence after being convicted of a 'third
strike' for stealing candy and cheese from a Los Angeles County
grocery store," author Don Thompson wrote. "The conviction in 2000
followed another petty theft and a string of robberies nearly 30 years
ago."

A life sentence for petty theft? And it's costing taxpayers $98,000 to
$138,000 a year to incarcerate sick inmates such as Mr. Rodriguez -
more than twice to lock up a healthy prisoner.

Is this really what California voters had in mind when they approved
Three Strikes 14 years ago?

The law of unintended consequences has caught up with California. The
state budget and the prison system are broken, and federal judges are
now taking charge of the latter.

Legislators, the governor and Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation officials have been working for years now to reduce
overcrowded conditions in a system that was built for 100,000 inmates
and now houses 159,000. That number, at least, has dropped from a
170,000 peak, but the prisons are still overcrowded. And there has
been some effort to put "rehabilitation" back into the system's
mission, in hopes of easing the recidivism rate that contributes to
overcrowding. But to date, all efforts to reform the law that allows
life sentences to be imposed for petty crimes have failed. An
initiative to repair the Three Strikes law in 2006 was defeated by
voters. Another initiative headed for this November's ballot didn't
even qualify. And a recent attempt by the governor and Legislature to
put together a sentencing commission that might bring some sanity to
the process fell apart amid partisan squabbling.

Indeed, of the 11 ballot measures (and counting) that California
voters will weigh in on this fall, two would lead to even longer and
stricter prison sentences, while a third would divert nonviolent
substance abusers into treatment.

One member of the lock-'em-up crowd, state Sen. George Runner,
R-Antelope Valley, recently issued a report titled "Who Is in Our
State Prisons?" in an attempt to show that there is nothing wrong with
Three-Strikes - that California is about average when it comes to
incarceration rates.

That may well be true, but the same credible sources of Sen. Runner's
statistics also show that incarceration rates are rising throughout
the nation as politicians try to outdo each other in being tough on
crime. At the middle of last year, the U.S. Justice Departments Bureau
of Justice Statistics reports, there were 762 persons per 100,000 U.S.
residents in jail or prison -11 percent more than in 2002, when the
national incarceration rate was 684 persons per 100,000; 131 percent
more than in 1997 when the rate was 330 per 100,000; and 348 percent
more than in 1987, when the rate was 170 per 100,000.

Because California's prison population didn't rise as quickly as Three
Strikes opponents believed it might initially, Sen. Runner claims the
law hasn't caused explosive growth in the prisons.

"Equally dubious is the claim that California prisons are filled with
low-level offenders and drug addicts," says the senator, who is
backing one of the get-tougher ballot initiatives this fall. "The most
recent census (Dec. 31, 2007) of state prison inmates ... reports that
53.1 percent of men in California's prison were committed for crimes
against persons."

A bare majority of inmates may well be serving time for violent
crimes, but that leaves a substantial number who are incarcerated for
nonviolent felonies. A California Legislative Analysts' report from a
few years ago showed that at the end of 2004, there were 5,130 second-
and third-strike inmates serving long prison sentences for merely
possessing a controlled substance. Another 2,363 were imprisoned for
"petty theft with a prior."

California can't afford this. And since our Legislature and governor
aren't willing to tackle sentencing reform, it's going to be up to
voters to study those ballot measure carefully this fall, with an eye
toward avoiding more unintended consequences.