PRISON LOVE

In the Race for Governor, Schwarzenegger and Angelides Have Abandoned
Reform and Learned to Love the Powerful Prison Guards Union

California can't afford to keep 56-year-old Beverly Henry in prison.
But those who work there just won't let her go. Once a struggling
Venice Beach drug addict, she was sent to prison in 1998 for 15 years
for selling a $20 bag of heroin to an undercover officer in order to
support her habit. Taxpayers know that drug treatment is cheaper than
prison that's why they voted in Proposition 36 in 2000, which would
send a case like hers to rehab instead but back when Henry got
popped, the state lacked the minimum resources necessary to treat
drug addiction, so Henry ended up in Chowchilla, at the Central
California Women's Facility.

In Chowchilla, she struggles to survive intolerable overcrowding and
a health care system so deadly it's been taken over by the feds, and
her continued incarceration is costing state taxpayers $34,000 per
year, every year, with no relief in sight.

Henry is not unique, either. Over 70 percent of the women in
California's prisons are serving time for nonviolent property or drug
offenses. Most are black, like Henry, or other minorities, and many
have children and families, and for most, prison will provide them
with almost no resources to change their lives when they get out. In
fact, it will make their situation infinitely worse.

No one benefits from the system as it exists today no one, that is,
except the state's powerful prison guard union, the California
Correctional Peace Officers Association. The CCPOA has emerged as one
of the top contributors to every state legislative campaign in the
past decade it will spend as much as $10 million this fall and in the
past has fiercely opposed just about every attempt to downsize the
prison system. Henry suggests a few in a recent letter, passed along
by Justice Now, a prisoners' advocacy organization.

"If California really wants to reduce the prisoner population, they
should eliminate nonsense parole violations that cycle people back
into prison, and initiate change that happens before a number is
attached to an individual's name," writes Henry, who is the author of
several eloquent newspaper editorials. "Why not build ... facilities
and use them for drug rehabilitation or work-furlough programs that
people can attend as an alternative to incarceration? These programs
are sorely needed and incredibly scarce, particularly in Southern
California where so many female prisoners come from."

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger agrees with Henry or at least he did
during the Recall Election in 2003, when he refused to take money
from the CCPOA and declared his intention to address the abuse and
overcrowding in the state's prison system, close prisons, and cut
wasteful spending. His own prison reform commission, headed up by
former California Governor George Deukmejian, found in 2004 that one
key to reforming the system lies in reducing the numbers of inmates.
And the governor repeated this logic only 18 months ago, during his
January 2005 State of the State address, in which he announced the
formation of a new $6 billion corrections agency that would squeeze
inmates and union influence out of the prison-industrial complex.

But suddenly, it's an election year, and the words "reform" and
"reward" get terribly confused.

In something of a reversal laid out in this year's State of the State
speech and announced again with new emphasis on June 26,
Schwarzenegger has proposed a $3.6 billion gift to the union an
expansion of the state corrections system, easing crowding by
building two brand new prisons at $500 million each, shipping as many
as 5,000 illegal immigrant prisoners to other states, and moving
4,500 nonviolent women inmates to community facilities closer to
their families. He has called for the state legislature to act on
these ideas in a special session in August.

"The problem is there is one solution put forward, and that is build,
build, build. Increasing the number of cells will only increase the
number of people in prison. History teaches us that if you build
them, you fill them," says Rose Braz, national campaign coordinator
for Critical Resistance, a prison reform organization.

"This is actually a huge expansion that's going to have dramatic
impacts on the course of the prisons and criminal justice and all of
our other social services, for years and years to come," adds Braz.

This shocking reversal would seem to be a real liability for
Schwarzenegger in his bid for reelection as governor and would be an
even bigger liability if his Democratic rival, state Treasurer Phil
Angelides, hadn't proposed an expansion that might turn out to be
even more expensive.

Angelides's plan, announced July 6 amidst a ton of hoopla about
Schwarzenegger's inaction on the prisons, is to declare an immediate
state of emergency, freeing up funds to open two disused prisons,
fill up to 3,000 vacant prison and parole staff positions, and
appoint new managers at the state's Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation. Those managers would have 90 days to present a plan
to turn the prisons around and tell us how much it would all cost.

CCPOA spokesman Larry Corcoran says the union hasn't decided who to
back for governor, and there are problems with both proposals. But,
he says, "We're happy to see that both candidates are interested in
prisons as part of the whole infrastructure problem facing all
Californians, whether it be roads, hospitals, or schools." Happy,
yes. Because both candidates are now openly competing for CCPOA's
approval and campaign money.

And that, says Henry, is a recipe for disaster. In a letter written
in opposition to AB2066, an Assembly bill to move 4,500 women
prisoners which has now become part of Schwarzenegger's proposal, she
? adds: "AB2066 promotes prison expansion and will result in
significant cost increases for the state." She notes that the state
will have to build or retrofit new facilities in which to house these
women, and that men will simply take the freed beds.

"AB2066 is not a solution. It is part of the problem," she concludes.

Exacerbating the problem, unfortunately, is now the only proposal on the table.

'Abject State of Disrepair'

Crime-fighters and victims' rights advocates love to put folks in
prison, piling statutes like the "three strikes" law on top of
ever-increasing mandatory minimum sentence requirements, year after
year. As crime drops, sometimes dramatically, the number of prisoners
keeps going up, and just about everyone forced to actually interact
with California's prison system agrees that the Herculean expansion
of the prisons in the last two decades has been a disaster.

Since 1985, the number of state prisons has increased from 13 to 33,
all of them overcrowded every step of the way, and the state's
Corrections budget has ballooned from $923 million to $5.7 billion in
2004. The state now houses about 171,000 inmates in facilities built
for less than 100,000, and supervises 117,000 parolees. Or doesn't
supervise them, actually, and has no hope of catching up. That's
because the system is designed to stuff itself, and the unions,
victims' rights groups, private prison contractors, and state
construction contractors have banded together to play on public fears
and keep it that way.

"People say the prison population numbers should go down. I don't
disagree with that. I don't think anybody does," says Terry Thornton,
spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation. "But our recidivism rates are going down, they've
been going down for the last four years, and the rate of
incarceration of new commitments is lower now than it was 10 years
ago. But yet our population numbers keep going up."

Thornton says this is due to better policing and a rapidly increasing
population, but that's only a small part of the picture. Prison
watchers say the number of inmates as a percentage of population has
to go down.

The system was already suffocating under its own weight long before
Schwarzenegger came in, and a 1995 lawsuit had required U.S. District
Judge Thelton Henderson to study the idea of taking the state prisons
into federal receivership and to appoint a special master to study a
couple of problem prisons. After Schwarzenegger toured his first
prison in August of 2004, he cavalierly shrugged off the federal
takeover, saying in a press conference, "I don't care. He can take
it. It's no sweat off my back."

He started caring soon enough, when the CCPOA started beating on him
during his first budget battle. He and the California Senate wanted
to trim a 37 percent pay raise promised to the guards by former
Governor Gray Davis, but they soon cut a deal with the union to grant
them favors in return for postponing the raise. Even while this was
happening, a 40-member commission created by Schwarzenegger, and
headed by Deukmejian, released its report, "Reforming California's
Youth and Adult Correctional System," a 300-page document that
suggested over 200 different reforms to the system.

The report pulled no punches, calling the entire state system
"dysfunctional," noting that the state's sentencing, parole, and
rehabilitation systems were creating a recidivism rate higher than
any other state in the late '90s, it was up around 66 percent,
meaning two-thirds of felons released from prison returned to prison.
It noted a "code of silence" that protected rogue guards. It faulted
the CCPOA directly, saying it had too much influence over management
decisions and needed to be limited to issues of pay and working conditions.

That report recommended downsizing, but not until the system
eliminated "ugly beds," meaning beds that were stacked six to a
one-man cell, in hallways, in gymnasiums, and sometimes in tents outdoors.

Schwarzenegger seemed to take this to heart, and appointed Jeanne
Woodward as his corrections secretary to do battle with the union and
begin the arduous task of reducing the number of Californians in
prison. But in October 2005, after losing badly on all four of his
ballot measures in an expensive and much-ballyhooed special election,
Schwarzenegger made changes to his administration that apparently
complicated his tough stance on prison reform.

According to a report made public in June by Special Master John
Hagar, Schwarzenegger's new chief of staff, Democratic operative
Susan Kennedy, re-opened lines of communication with the union and
began negotiating in order to move the reform agenda. By January
2005, Woodward had quit. She cited personal reasons, but Hagar stated
that she resigned after Kennedy and another Schwarzenegger staffer
helped the CCPOA torpedo Woodward's choice to run the Labor Relations
Department. Schwarzenegger responded by renaming the entire
department the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and
appointing Rod Hickman as secretary. Within a month, Hickman had also
quit, and told the Los Angeles Times that he left because of CCPOA
interference in the Schwarzenegger administration. The union's Lance
Corcoran dismissed these charges as "lunacy."

In his report, however, Hagar excoriates Kennedy, saying she's "in
the pocket" of the union.

"The special master has made egregious allegations based on a report
that is riddled with errors," says Bill Maile, the governor's spokesman.

And the news keeps getting better. Earlier in 2006, Judge Henderson
put the state prison's $1.4 billion health care system into federal
receivership, citing a horror in which an average of one state
prisoner was dying per week. On July 6, Receiver Bob Sillen said the
entire system was in an "abject state of disrepair."

Building ... to Rehabilitate

On that festering wound, both Schwarzenegger and Angelides propose
pouring the salve of more prisons.

"There's absolutely nothing being done to decrease the prison
population and to make prison conditions better," says Geri Silva,
director of Families Against California Three Strikes, or FACTS,
which aims to keep nonviolent repeat offenders from getting
outlandishly long prison terms. "The only thoughts in mind are to
plow more money into it.

"There is no correlation between their solution and the problem," she
adds, "And, of course, again, the only people that it works for are
the building trades they're just making huge amounts of money and the
prison guards union."

The people of California evidently agree with Silva. In a statewide
Field Poll released on March 1, 76 percent of Californians said they
were willing to pay for new road construction, but only 36 percent
backed new prison construction. A similar recent poll by the Public
Policy Institute of California found crime didn't make the list of
top priorities that the governor should address, and only 24 percent
backed new prison construction.

The Angelides team, however, see this as an issue where the governor
is vulnerable to attack, and they mean to exploit it.

"What you've had is a governor who's been in office for three years,
who's stood by, idly and incompetently," says Dan Newman, a spokesman
for Angelides. "You've got a prison system that even his own people
have been warning is a threat to public safety. The courts have been
threatening to release tens of thousands of people back into the public.

"Like on so many subjects, he's done nothing or the wrong thing until
we're 100 days before an election. Then suddenly he's developed a new
election-year interest in this crisis," Newman adds.

Angelides said in a press conference that Schwarzenegger had
developed a case of CYA, or "cover your ass." But both asses must be
well covered, because there's not much difference between the two
plans both emphasize build-and-hire. Angelides has said in interviews
that reforms would take shape under his new corrections management.
The Schwarzenegger camp has charged Angelides with "me-too-ism."

"People are sleeping in day rooms and gyms, and that makes it really
hard to rehabilitate," says Elaine Jennings, spokeswoman for the
state corrections department. "It's about, a) getting enough beds;
and b) putting these reforms into action."

To that end, the governor's latest budget designated $52.8 million
for in-prison programs up from $7.5 million last year meaning job
training, education, counseling, and family support services.

"We have to break the cycle of recidivism," she adds.

CCPOA's Lance Corcoran said he thinks that neither plan would take
the "drastic measures" necessary to address the current crisis. By
that, he means neither plan would build prisons fast enough to
alleviate overcrowding, stating that "during the Wilson years, we
used to be able to get a prison built in two years."

Having perhaps taken a hard look at those recent poll numbers,
however, Corcoran also admits that the CCPOA agrees with the goal of
reducing recidivism.

"Absolutely," he says. "We'd like to see prisons be more successful,
meaning that fewer and fewer people come back to them. If the public
doesn't believe that the prison system is effectively helping people
to correct their behavior, they lose faith, and that becomes
something from a taxpayer perspective that I'm not willing to invest in.

"However, there's more to corrections than just the four walls of the
institution," he adds. "There's what led to incarceration, and what
types of opportunities were provided to the felon before they
actually became incarcerated. And there are the services that are
provided within the four walls of the institution during their stay
in prison. Those types of services, whether they be educational or
rehabilitative, have been drastically slashed under the
Schwarzenegger administration." That is, until this year.

Corcoran also notes that the union supports sentencing reform, to get
away from mandatory sentences and return to what he calls
"indeterminate sentencing," and backs parole reform to get low-level
offenders out of the system rather than sending them back for
something as silly as missing a meeting. He says the union also
disagrees with laws that won't allow felons from being licensed by
the state, as that won't allow many former inmates a clean slate and
a second shot at life.

However, just like the prison reform advocates, the CCPOA isn't
seeing any of these proposals on the table.

"We're reluctant to say that anything is a good idea, at this point,"
says Corcoran. "Given political whims and political winds, we have an
ever-shifting leadership team, with differing priorities. When that
mission is constantly changing it just leads to confusion."

Angelides spokesman Newman says he can settle the leadership
question. "Mr. Angelides has compared it to taking over a bankrupt
company. It needs a new CEO to come in and roll up his sleeves and
fix it," he says. "No one's being served by the system we have in
place now, by having a prison system in meltdown and a governor
determined to ignore the crisis."

Perhaps Schwarzenegger put it more succinctly in his State of the
State speech this year: "Our proposal provides for two new prisons, a
new crime lab, emergency response facilities and space for 83,000 new
prisoners over the next ten years. We must keep the people safe. I
say build it."