PRISON CRISIS: WILL CALIFORNIA SPEND MORE ON JAILS THAN UNIVERSITIES?

Halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco is Solano Correctional
Facility, nestled against a series of rolling hills, on the outskirts
of the small city of Vacaville.

From the prison's guard towers, the view is fairly beautiful: a
Mediterranean-type vista of sun-browned grass and squat trees
covering green hills, underneath the endlessly deep California sky.
But from the windows of the dorms and cellblocks where the inmates
live, all they can see is a slender patch of sky.

Inside some of the housing units at Solano, inmates take showers in
rooms open to the entire dorm -- including guards, both male and
female. As naked men soap themselves off, other inmates go about
their business in front of them. Hundreds of men share a handful of
toilets, as well as the mildew-and-mold-infested open shower area.
"There's maybe 10 operable toilets for 200 guys. You come back from
chow in the morning, you stand in line 10-to-20 minutes to use the
toilet," says 47-year-old Michael Donoho, a heavily tattooed repeat
offender (drugs, robbery, spousal abuse).

Meanwhile, two one-time gyms -- that in better days hosted boxing
rings for prisoners -- have served as "temporary" dorms since the
mid-'90s. Today they house more than 200 inmates apiece. Prisoners
are stacked on row after row of triple bunks, with three feet of
floor space separating one bunk frame from another. Nobody expects
the gyms to return to their intended function anytime soon.

Safety is also an issue. The top bunks in the gyms are well over five
feet off the ground and have no railings around them. It is,
according to prisoners, fairly common for slumbering third-tier
inmates to roll off their narrow metal beds onto the hard floor
during the night.

But the sounds of sleeping men falling aren't the only noises heard
after dark. During the long hours of the night, two correctional
officers walk the floor and one more stands watch on a raised tier
with a gun at the ready. Prisoner representatives from every race sit
awake, perched atop their bunks, grimly scanning the walkways in case
a rival from another race-based gang decides to launch a small-hours attack.

In the summer, large industrial-scale fans never stop whirring, and
when the voices cease in the hours between lights-out at 10 p.m. and
the 3 a.m. wake-up for inmate culinary workers, their whir eats its
way into the mind. Add in all of the other sounds of a large,
security-based institution, and you have the ingredients for mental chaos.

"The whole time I've been locked up, I've never gotten more than
three hours of good, solid sleep," says a 46-year-old inmate who is
serving a six-year sentence on methamphetamine charges. "Alarms going
off, guys running around, cops yelling. It's been a real eye-opening
experience."

When Solano opened in 1984, it was intended to hold 2,610 inmates.
Twelve years later, five dormitory buildings were added to the
original structure, boosting the prison's capacity by a thousand
inmates. No additional buildings have been added in the past 11
years, yet the sprawling, gray concrete and razor-wire institution
now holds 6,111 prisoners.

On paper, Solano has some of the best vocational training programs of
any prison in California, with a metal shop that makes snowplow
blades for the California Department of Transportation and a lens
shop that manufactures almost all spectacle lenses for Medi-Cal --
the state's more expansive version of Medicaid -- and Medicare
recipients statewide. The facility also routinely places
soon-to-be-paroled workers in free-world jobs, such as in lens labs
and opticians' offices, around the state. But on any given day,
Solano has thousands of idle inmates because there aren't enough
jobs, education slots and drug addiction treatment spots available
for the surplus prisoners.

"We do the best with the resources and staff that we have," says
Public Information Officer Lt. Tim Wamble, as he sits in his tidy
second-floor office, its window overlooking one of the guard towers.
"There's no way you can have 6,111 jobs or seats in classrooms. The
rest go on waiting lists. Which means they're hanging out in the yard
till something opens up for them."

California's experiment in wholesale incarceration is one of the
great policy failures of our times. Thirty years ago, California had
12 prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, after a generation
of "tough-on-crime" legislation pushed through the legislature and
the initiative process -- from three-strikes-and-you're-out to
draconian anti-drug and anti-gang legislation -- the state has close
to 175,000 inmates living in 34 prisons. That means almost one in
every 200 California residents is now a prisoner of the state. (And
these numbers don't even include the tens of thousands more prisoners
in county jails.) The annual cost to taxpayers is about $10 billion
per year, just shy of the amount the state annually puts into its
vaunted public university system. If current spending trends
continue, California will soon be spending more on prisons than on
universities.

Despite the massive funding, scandals have rocked the prison system
since the '90s. At the Corcoran Supermax, guards organized
"gladiatorial combats" between rival gang members on the prison yard
and would end the fights by shooting the antagonists apart with
rubber bullets. Faced with criminal investigations and a media
outcry, correctional administrators promised top-to-bottom reform.
They failed to deliver.

The state's youth authority has also been beset by scandals, with
videos surfacing that show gangs of officers severely beating
juvenile detainees. Large numbers of teens have been held in lockdown
conditions that make it impossible for them to attend school. Not too
many years ago, close to 10,000 teenagers and young adults under the
age of 25 were held in these state-run, youth authority institutions,
which were supposed to emphasize education and intensive
rehabilitation. In practice, they have become little more than
warehouses for young people whom the state has given up on. Today,
these institutions hold only 2,500 teenagers and young adults, and
current plans envision scaling the number to 1,500. Increasingly, as
courts have lost confidence in the state system, juvenile offenders
are instead being channeled into juvenile halls run by counties.

What's more, in the past decade, the state signed deeply unpopular
sweetheart contracts with the politically powerful prison officers'
trade union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association
(CCPOA). (The base salary for a long-time CCPOA member is now
$73,000, and with overtime, many officers earn more than $100,000 a year.)

Perhaps most damning, by the early years of the century, California
had a return-to-prison rate for parolees near 70 percent, which was
worse than any other state. By contrast, as of December 2006,
Florida's return-to-prison rate was 53 percent, New York's was 56
percent and Texas' was 25 percent, according to data collected by the
Center for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California
at Irvine.

In response, two years ago Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger brought in new
directors to run the system. He also hired a management consultant
team, led by Cal State Northridge Professor Alan Glassman, to reform
the way the various correctional bureaucracies functioned and to
restore public confidence in their workings. At the same time, the
state relaunched a multimillion-dollar research arm of the
correctional system. Researchers, led by Professor Joan Petersilia
from the University of California at Irvine's School of Social
Ecology, had a mandate to study what sorts of programming most
positively benefited prisoners.

Such a body had existed in the past and had been seen as being on the
cutting edge of American criminology, with its strong emphasis on
identifying and promoting rehabilitation strategies tailored to the
individual. But it was scrapped during the heyday of tough-on-crime
legislation in the '80s. Symbolically, as a part of this tilt back
toward programming, in 2005, the state changed the name of the prison
system from the Department of Corrections to the Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation.

But, one by one, the system's new reformers, led by Youth and Adult
Correctional Authority Director Rod Hickman and Corrections and
Rehabilitation Director Jeannie Woodford, resigned, disillusioned
with the receding possibility for change. And the system's reputation
headed further south, a reality publicly acknowledged by officials
from Schwarzenegger to the chair of the state senate public safety
committee to prison reform attorneys to Keith Jimenez, president of the CCPOA.

Facing at least the possibility of the entire prison system being
placed under court control because of chronic overcrowding, panicked
state politicians -- urged on by Schwarzenegger -- this year approved
a $7.3 billion emergency measure, known as AB 900, to expand the
system by a mammoth 53,000 beds.

Over three decades, the combination of political demagoguery and
public fear has had a toxic effect on California's criminal justice
system. A prime example is the Three Strikes law that passed in 1994
after the high-profile murder of 12-year-old Polly Klass by a violent
repeat offender named Richard Allen Davis. Politicians promised the
law would ensure that violent predators, rather than petty criminals,
would be taken off the streets for at least 25 years. That's not how
it has played out.

Many studies have shown that huge numbers of offenders are convicted
of nonviolent, often drug-related third strikes, and that these cases
are clogging up both the courts and the prisons. In 2004, the ACLU
found that 65 percent of three-strikers had been convicted of
nonviolent third offenses, and that 10 times as many Californians
have "struck out" for drug possession than for second-degree murder.
Close to half of those who have struck out are African American. Yet
over several years, California's elected officials have been unable
to agree on how to reform the law.

"There's no strategy behind the incarceration," says attorney Sara
Norman of the Bay Area-based prisoner-rights group, the Prison Law
Office. Her colleague Don Specter goes further. The state, he says,
is all-too-quick to incarcerate, but is "unwilling to pay for the
humane treatment" of those it locks up for years and even decades at a stretch.

While more and more dollars are being devoted to corrections, the
amount of money available per inmate for programming (such as
education, drug treatment, vocational training, mental health care
and so on) has declined as a percentage of the total cost of
incarceration. In June, the state senate subcommittee in charge of
overseeing the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's budget
reported that a mere 5 percent of the $43,000 California spends on
each inmate each year currently goes toward rehabilitation programs.

To understand what has gone wrong, one has to go back more than 30
years and examine a generation's worth of flawed criminal justice
policy-making at both the state and federal levels. It's what
freelance journalist and one-time editor of the Boulder Weekly Joel
Dyer once pungently termed a "perpetual prisoner machine."

The growth in California's carceral infrastructure is in keeping with
changes that kicked in nationally during the '70s -- a few years
before California abandoned its liberal criminal justice policies --
and that continue to the present day, resulting in a five-fold
increase in the number of prisoners nationally. On any given day,
about 2.2 million Americans are either in jail or in prison, with
approximately two-thirds of these inmates in state and federal
prisons. The remaining one-third is in county jails. This has created
a $100 billion a year incarceration industry.

The War on Drugs explains much of the explosion, sending huge numbers
of men and women, a disproportionate number of them poor blacks and
Latinos, into state and federal prisons. The sentences handed out to
drug offenders often exceed those served by rapists and other violent
offenders.

Meanwhile, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, under the
banner of "reform," has left hundreds of thousands of people without
adequate access to medications, counseling and effective support
networks. Many of them have subsequently spiraled into the criminal
justice system. In California, about one in five inmates is seriously
mentally ill. The state is struggling to provide comprehensive
treatment to these inmates without bankrupting the entire correctional system.

"By the time somebody gets to prison, we're already a thousand steps
behind," says state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, who has
pushed several major reforms in recent years designed to build up
community mental health networks and also strengthen mental health
care for the state's tens of thousands of mentally ill prisoners.
"The point is, how are we going to keep people out of these prisons?
You don't make up for years of neglect in one or two or three years."

Movement away from indeterminate sentencing -- a process originally
supported by both the left and right -- has generally resulted in
more people serving longer sentences. So, too, did curtailment of
parole and the passage of "truth in sentencing" laws that made
prisoners serve almost all of their sentences before being eligible
to go up before the parole board -- both reforms popular with the
newly powerful "victims rights" movement in the '90s.

Yet California's prison system is peculiarly dysfunctional. A half
century ago, under Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown, the state was known for
having one of the most progressive prison systems in the country, one
that emphasized rehabilitation, drug treatment, education and
alternatives to incarceration. Some of its prisons even boasted
world-class libraries behind their imposing walls. That trend held
through Ronald Reagan's years in Sacramento (1966-1974), and stayed
good as recently as the gubernatorial tenure of Pat Brown's son,
Jerry, in the late '70s. But today, after the disastrously "tough"
consecutive gubernatorial tenures of George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson
and Gray Davis from 1983 to 2003, the system is a byword for failure.

In January, the Little Hoover Commission, a major Sacramento-based
think tank, issued a report that declared the system to be "in a
tailspin that threatens public safety and raises the risk of fiscal
disaster." Almost all of the system's correctional institutions are
operating way over capacity, with some, like Solano, at near double
capacity for about a decade now, according to the report.

Because Solano is a medium security institution, housing level II and
level III inmates, prison administrators have the option of simply
cramming more and more bodies into open spaces, a "luxury" not
available to wardens in charge of higher security facilities. For
example, at high security sites, such as the supermaxes of Pelican
Bay, located in Crescent City, in the far north of the state, and the
Central Valley's Corcoran prison, prisoners must be locked up in
individual cells and allowed out for, at most, one hour per day.

California's solution? Build still more prison beds -- and hope these
beds end up solving the existing overcrowding problem, rather than
simply becoming an excuse to incarcerate evermore offenders.

At the heart of AB 900, the bill Schwarzenegger signed into law this
year to tackle the overcrowding crisis, is a $7.3 billion bond act
that will be used to build housing for more than 50,000 new beds. In
a departure from recent spending priorities, many thousands of these
beds will be specifically reserved for rehabilitation units, drug
treatment centers and mental health sites within correctional
settings. The legislation also seeks emergency short-term responses
to address overcrowding, including allowing the state to ship 8,000
prisoners to privately run facilities in Arizona and Mississippi.

Some critics have lambasted the legislation as paving the way for the
biggest single prison-building spree in U.S. history, but its
supporters argue it represents a new dawn for the troubled system.
Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation, says that after decades of inertia, the
department finally has a plan, "and we should be given time to make
the plan work." Defending the combination of building plans and
rehabilitation ambitions, he explains that "before you can have
rehabilitation programs, you've got to have places for them."

The truth lies somewhere in between these two arguments. Given the
number of people being sentenced to prison in California, more beds
are certainly needed. The question is: Might it not have been a wiser
strategy, albeit a more politically risky one, to create a Sentencing
Commission? In the wake of the post-2001 fiscal crises experienced at
the state level, several states have used such commissions to
reexamine many of the mandatory sentencing laws put in place since
the '70s, in order to lower the numbers coming into prison and to
shrink the prisoner population. AB 900 sidesteps this more in-depth,
systemic, approach to criminal justice reform, instead focusing on
delivering more services within prison settings.

And here's the rub: Even assuming AB 900 works in the long run, it's
increasingly likely that the courts won't be willing to wait that
long. In June, two federal judges for the eastern district of
California, Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton, held hearings in
a packed, wood-paneled, 16th floor courtroom in Sacramento's Federal
Building. They discussed how prison overcrowding was making it
impossible to deliver constitutionally acceptable levels of medical
and mental health care to prisoners. Over the past several years, the
judges had presided over two separate cases, one on the provision of
mental health services inside prisons and another looking at the
general quality of health care services behind bars. With plaintiffs
in both cases now arguing that chronic overcrowding is making it
impossible for court-ordered improvements to be implemented,
Henderson and Karlton decided to pool their resources and hold one
set of hearings on the issue.

"There are no rehabilitative programs," Karlton noted testily. "Part
of the problem is this is a fantasy. They barely have the ability to
house people. Where are you going to find the space to meaningfully
rehabilitate people?"

Don Specter, from the Prison Law Office, argued the situation is now
so dire that only a court-imposed population cap on the prison system
can nudge the state toward effective changes. He calls overcrowding
"a crisis of constitutional dimensions that is dangerous for
prisoners, unsafe for staff and a threat to the public." Specter and
his colleagues urged the two judges to form a three-judge panel that
would hear arguments and decide whether to force the state to
rollback its prison population. To the amazement of many observers,
they received an amicus brief from the prison workers' trade union, CCPOA.

The prison system, the CCPOA now argues, is in near-terminal crisis,
with wardens unable to fill vacancies for several thousand guards'
jobs, despite the high salaries offered correctional officers. The
association asserts that the Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation is massively failing in its newly rediscovered mission
to rehabilitate incarcerated offenders. It is, according to the
union, a tinderbox ready to explode, with union members at risk of
being attacked by inmates because of poor prison conditions.

While some of the CCPOA rhetoric is gamesmanship -- the union
responding to political intransigence on the prison issue and to its
stunning loss of ground in contract negotiations in the years since
Gray Davis lost office -- not all its criticisms are just for strategic effect.

"AB 900 was a farce, a scam perpetuated against California's people,"
says union spokesperson Ryan Sherman, over lunch at Chops, one of
Sacramento's favorite hangouts for lobbyists. "It was designed to
hoodwink the federal government that they were finally taking action
to end the crisis. It's not real. It's not reform. It's prison construction."

According to Sherman, corrections spending in California has doubled
in the past four years and corrections itself hasn't gotten better.
"We shouldn't be spending so much locking up more and more people.
Other things impact our members, not just in prison but in the
community. Better schools. Better roads. A lot of things are
important," he says.

In the end, Henderson and Karlton agreed to create a three-judge
panel that will decide whether to impose a population cap on the
state's prison system. It will start hearing arguments sometime this
fall. And the panel may begin imposing a population cap as early as 2008.

Absent rapid and wholesale release of inmates -- which even
proponents accept is hardly an ideal solution to California's woes --
ongoing overcrowding means that many prisoners will spend years in
settings like Solano. And, in a throwback to pre-modern prison
conditions, all sorts of criminals are mixed together in these
latter-day communal dungeons. "You might have a guy in here doing 16
months for a DUI and a guy doing 10 years for robbery," Lt. Wamble
acknowledges.

Not surprisingly, in addition to being petri dishes of criminality,
the gym dorms in Solano and elsewhere are breeding grounds for
disease. In the past few years, chicken pox epidemics have broken
out, one gym had to be locked down to contain a spreading
tuberculosis contagion, gastroenteritis has run rampant, inmates
regularly report devastating flu outbreaks and staph infection is commonplace.

"I got sick, like a flu, when I first got in here," recalls
22-year-old Ramon Wilson, who is serving five years on a drug
conviction. "I couldn't get out of bed I was so weak. Nauseated.
Couldn't eat." He continues, "I've seen spider bites. Mice. Rats
running around. Mice will get inside the lockers and eat the food.
There's people on hot meds -- psych meds -- who can flip out any
second. The C.O.s [corrections officers], some give us respect,
others play games like we're little children."

The correctional system's ability to provide constitutionally
mandated levels of health care has been successfully challenged in a
series of lawsuits. And the mental health system is in such shambles
that it has been removed from state control and is now being run by a
federal special master.

California's story is in many ways akin to what took place in almost
every state in America since the '80s. A nationwide lunge to the
right, politically and culturally, has resulted in a dismantling of
rehabilitation programs, a vast growth in the penal infrastructure
and an increased emphasis on locking more people up for
ever-more-petty offenses; putting in place ever-harsher conditions,
such as secure housing units and supermax prisons; and an
unprecedented transferring of the mentally ill, the drug addicted and
the undereducated poor into the criminal justice system.

But while these trends are national in scope, California's size and
its tough-on-crime mentality have produced a prison system that is
unique both in its scale and, increasingly, in its sheer dysfunction
and utter failure to rehabilitate.

"California basically started warehousing people in the early '80s
and that's when things started going to hell," Dale Richter of the
prison-reform group Friends Committee on Legislation in California
argues. "California's correctional system hasn't had a defined
mission for quite some years."

Today, California stands on the threshold of a new era. Unless the
state's residents send strong signals to their elected officials that
enough's enough when it comes to prison-building, it will only be a
matter of time before more state dollars go into locking up its
citizens than providing its young people with a public university education.

In many ways, California remains a place of dreams, the pot of gold
at the end of the American rainbow. But its criminal justice policies
have, at the very least, put a dent in the optimism. California's
gold rush to mass incarceration reflects priorities gone awry to a
spectacular degree. It has taken three decades to get this far off
track. Let's hope it doesn't take that long to put the state's
criminal justice system back on a fairer, saner footing.

Sasha Abramsky is the author, most recently, of American Furies:
Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment.