PRISON SPENDING HITS A BRICK WALL

In a season of deep deficits and alarming program cuts, why aren't
states more seriously focused on reducing their swelling prison populations?

The Vera Institute of Justice reports unusual progress - 22 states,
pressed by recession, reluctantly starting cutbacks. But with a
world-leading 2.3 billion people behind bars, the United States has a
long, long ways to go.

California's case is extreme - but illustrative. In the mid-1970s, it
was jailing 20,000 offenders. Today the total is 168,000 inmates - an
increase of 740 percent. In 1999, its prison system cost an already
massive $4 billion to operate.

Now, with more prisoners, more penitentiaries, more guards, more
health costs, the budget figure has topped $10 billion - a big
contributor to the $26 billion state budget shortfall.

And the money is producing more horrors than cures. After 14 years of
lawsuits by inmates alleging cruel and unusual punishment, a
three-judge federal court panel on Aug. 4 ordered California to
reduce its prisoner roll by 43,000 inmates over the next two years.

The state, the judges wrote shortly before a major riot at a prison
in Chino, has created a "criminogenic" system that actually pushes
prisoners and parolees to more crimes through "appalling," "horrific"
prison conditions:

"Thousands of prisoners are assigned to 'bad beds,' such as
triple-bunked beds placed in gymnasiums or day rooms, and some
institutions have populations approaching 300 percent of their
intended capacity.

In these overcrowded conditions, inmate-on-inmate violence is almost
impossible to prevent, infectious diseases spread more easily, and
lockdowns are sometimes the only means by which to maintain control.
In short, California's prisons are bursting at the seams and are
impossible to manage."

Mentally ill inmates are left without access to health care, said the
judges, noting that in the last four years "a California inmate was
dying needlessly every six or seven days."

California's fiscal crisis has already led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
and legislative leaders to agree to cut $1.2 billion from the prison
budget. They haven't agreed how, though discussion includes reducing
prison rolls by up to 37,000 through early releases and revised
parole practices.

Already, California's increasingly ideological Republicans are
opposed; Assembly Leader Sam Blakeslee talks darkly of "letting out
some very dangerous criminals onto our streets and into our neighborhoods."

And it isn't just Republicans who resist significant reform - it's
California's powerful "prison-industrial complex."

Last autumn, the reformist Drug Policy Alliance Network and its
allies put a Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act on the ballot.
Supported by a wide range of treatment officials and former
high-ranking corrections officials, it focused on non-prison
treatment for nonviolent drug offenders plus good time credits for
inmates and fewer arrests of parolees for technical violations.
California's high recidivism rates would be curbed and billions in
new prison construction forestalled, the advocates claimed.

But California's prison guards union (with 2,000-plus members earning
over $100,000 a year) didn't like the idea of fewer inmates (and jobs).

So with other pro-prison forces, it mounted a $3.5 million television
advertising campaign in opposition. California's political
establishment fell into line including Schwarzenegger and former
governors such as present Attorney General Jerry Brown (a likely 2010
gubernatorial candidate). The measure lost resoundingly.

In contrast to California's folly, New York state has actually
reduced its prison rolls by 10,000 in the last decade. How?

By relying heavily on the types of alternative treatment for
nonviolent offenders that California spurns. And just this year, New
York finally repealed the infamous "Rockefeller drug laws" that
helped swell its prisons with minor offenders serving long terms.

Now California reformers are pushing a "People's Budget Fix" formula
they say would save at least $12 billion over the next five years. It
includes a claimed $5.5 billion through community-based addiction
treatment for minor drug offenses (proposed by the Drug Policy
Alliance Network).

Another $1 billion a year, it's claimed, could be saved by limiting
three-strikes penalties to violent crimes (not just shoplifting or
simple drug possession). Emptying Death Row by converting
California's current capital sentences to life without possibility of
parole - an American Civil Liberties Union proposal - would
reportedly save $1 billion over five years.

Another $1 billion, it's claimed, would come from closing
California's dysfunctional youth prisons and shifting responsibility
to local programs with successful track records.

Such rational reforms - increasingly echoed in states nationally as
the fiscal grinder minces budgets - were needed long before the
current recession. They'll be important long afterward.

When, as a society, we take these rational steps, we'll not just save
dollars. We'll also start to spare the horrendous human waste and
harm to families of knee-jerk law-and-orderism that can't discern
between deep and serious criminal behavior and the missteps, usually
in youthful years, that most societies deal with far more calmly -
and effectively.