EXPORTING PRISONERS

California Ponders a Novel Method for Reducing Prison Overpopulation

A FEW WEEKS AGO, MOST California prison inmates were offered an
exciting travel opportunity. Autumn in Michigan can be beautiful,
after all, and Louisiana is pleasantly temperate in winter. The views
may not be great -- the four walls of a cell -- but all expenses would be paid.

In response to crisis-level overcrowding in California lockups, state
officials recently surveyed prisoners to see whether they would be
willing to be transferred to correctional facilities in other states.
If a prisoner said yes, he was asked to check a box next to the state
he would prefer. There were 23 choices, including Michigan and Louisiana.

The travel survey is not part of a new rehabilitation-via-bus-ride
program but a last-ditch effort by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to
avert a catastrophe in the making. With both the governor and the
Legislature unwilling to address the causes of California's prison
overpopulation woes, Schwarzenegger is instead going after the
symptoms by exporting the problem to the rest of the country.

California's correctional system is a train wreck. It's not just
because the state has the highest recidivism rate in the nation, or
because 16,000 of its 172,000 inmates are forced to sleep in gyms or
hallways, or because its medical system is so wretched that it had to
be taken over by a federal receiver. It's because the system
fundamentally fails to protect the public by not rehabilitating
inmates, while overburdened prisons, jails and courts put dangerous
criminals back on the streets long before they should because they
don't have the capacity to handle them.

Politicians pay lip service to fixing the prisons but then propose
only cosmetic solutions. In June, Schwarzenegger ordered a special
session of the Legislature on corrections and laid out a plan to
spend more than $1 billion on two new prisons and untold millions
more on private community facilities. His plan got nowhere, and the
Legislature adjourned without passing a single prison reform bill.

It was probably asking too much to expect lawmakers to take action in
an election year. Prison reform is a lose-lose game for politicians;
the things that would actually work are unpopular, while more popular
strategies -- such as tougher crime laws -- usually make the
situation worse. What's necessary is an overhaul of sentencing and
parole rules, reducing oversight of nonviolent criminals in order to
focus on more dangerous ones. More educational, vocational and drug
treatment programs are also needed.

So California may ship inmates out of state. It's a short-term and
inadequate fix. Prisoners can only be transferred to another state if
they give their permission, which most won't do because it would make
family visits difficult or impossible. Contracting with other states
to take California's prisoners may help stave off an immediate
crisis, but whoever wins the governor's race in November is going to
have to make prison reform a top priority. The system, and the
public, can't take four more years of inaction.