True Lies: Good Rhetoric on Prison Spending Is not a Plan for Action
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By Jonathan Simon
Most of what Governor Schwarzenegger has said during his six years in office about California’s bloated carceral state is true. Most of his proposals to move us beyond this obvious disaster for our polity amount to lies.
I have nothing against rhetoric, in fact I make my living producing and analyzing it (with apologies to the professionals in the rhetoric department). Indeed, I had great hopes that this action hero Governor might really use his clear rhetorical skills to tell Californians that we have too much fear embodied in our penal code and prison policies.
• He called the parole system “broken.”
• He described our prisons as involved in “warehousing people” (a phrase used by Marxist criminologists in my days in graduate school).
• He renamed our prison agency the “Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation” (a bit repetitive, but the right direction).
• And just the other day he spoke about the shame of a state that spends more on prisons than higher education (as if he was just arriving in the state).
Sadly, beyond renaming the boxes, Governor Schwarzenegger’s policy moves have mostly been non-serious, including this proposal to use our constitution to favor higher education spending over prisons.
• His initial approach to the impending court ordered population caps was to call for building space for another 50,000 prison beds (under the premise that they would provide reentry and rehabilitative services). AB900 became law, but has never been implemented.
• After initially calling for a new culture of rehabilitation within the prison service, he failed to back up his reform Secretaries of Correction, Rod Hickman and Jeannie Woodford, who were cut to pieces by resistance from the bureaucracy and from the powerful union and left to resign. Six years into his administration, his current corrections chief admitted that fewer than half of all prisoners leaving a California prison have had even a day of rehabilitative programming, let alone been rehabilitated.
• Now, he uses his final state of the state address to put forward a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee a bigger share of the state revenue to higher education than to state prisons. Putting aside the dubiousness of adding yet another amendment to our Rube Goldberg designed state constitution, the governor’s proposal is actually a call to privatize prisons, and thus reduce the cost per prisoner, rather than to reduce mass imprisonment itself. The proposal has no chance of being adopted in that form and should not be.
• The Governor’s latest budget proposal is more of the same. The plan calls for cutting prison spending by 1.2 billion, but with more than 800 million of it coming out of court ordered spending on prison medical facilities, something that will not happen.
In the end the Schwarzenegger administration has left Californians at an impasse on prisons.
We appear to be done with the era when California governors campaigned on their commitment to locking up ever more Californians regardless of the consequences for higher education or any other state priority, in the style of George Deukmeijian, Pete Wilson, and Gray Davis. But one searches the horizon in vain for the appearance of state leaders willing to talk honestly with Californians about the need to rethink our commitment to mass incarceration.
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Jonathan Simon is a professor of law at UC Berkeley and associate dean of the Berkeley’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy program. This article originally appeared on the Berkeley Blog.
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Arnold seems to ignore the fact that when he became governor the corrections budget was $2.2 billion dollars. Under his watchful eye, it grew to $10.6 billion dollars. He acts as though someone else was governor during this spending spree! He also paid out of his own pocket to run ads against Prop 66 that would have amended California’s Three Strikes Law and allow the re-sentencing of non- violent non serious offenders swept up in this law. His bald faced lies claimed 26,000 violent repeat offenders would be released. In truth there are only 8,000 third strikers and only about half would have been eligible for re-sentencing. Re-sentencing is not release! He has opposed the release of any inmate early and even those that have served long past their sentences. Arnold has proven to be completely disingenuous about reform and rehabilitation. Three months after announcing the addition of rehabilitation to the California Department of Corrections, he cut prison education by $95 million dollars. He has since made even deeper cuts to the point many prisons have no programs at all. His plan under AB900 was to add 56,000 new jail and prison beds, leaving California as the world’s leader in incarceration. Thankfully that plan was doomed in the beginning by the poorly written bill that was no more than a bad joke! Planning is underway to add 16,000 new prison beds this year using bond money without voter approval. He is fooling no one but himself!
What he SAYS about prisons and prison reform really doesn't matter. The man's a lame duck, and NOTHING he can do about the prison system at this late date will save significant money in the short time he has left in office. The legal system simply doesn't work that quickly.
What IS important is that there are WAY TOO MANY criminals in the state and it costs way too much to send them through the justice and prison system.
I wish it were possible to give everyone law-abiding values, but it isn't what we CAN do is exclude people from the state that shouldn't be here before they break laws - and that will require addressing the illegal immigrant problem. Yes, I know, the majority of illegal immigrants are NOT criminals. But 25% of those incarcerated in California prisons ARE illegal immigrants:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/305516/statistics_crimes_commit...
so if we got rid of the illegal immigrants we'd see a 25% drop in our prison costs from that one factor alone.
The second problem is one of tax base. We have lost it - both in the form of the decreased state income tax revenues from driving the corporations and wealthy out of the state and in the decline in real estate values from all the foreclosures from the NINJA loans Freddie and Fannie bought up.
In fact, we will be paying more money for interest alone in the next biennium on debts that we have as a state than we will for the prison system.
No, if Californis is going to get well, we are going to have to do some real basic things. Get rid of crimnals (especially those that aren't even citizens), make the entire justice syystem more streamlines and efficient, and produce a business and tax environment conducive to non-government jobs and retention of the wealthier people who are now leaving California in droves.
I am always very interested when I see information on crime committed by illegal immigrants and their percentage of California prison population. This is information I have search for many years now. Unfortunately Mr. Hanshaw offers as his source an article written by a housewife and bookkeeper with no empirical data to support such a claim. Mr. Hanshaw claims 25% of the inmate population are illegal immigrants. Fact is the FBI does NOT produce information on crimes committed by illegal immigrants. The INS does NOT produce information on crimes committed by illegal immigrants. The CDCR does NOT produce information on crimes committed by illegal immigrants. If what Mr. Hanshaw claims is true 42,000 inmates would be illegal immigrants. The total Latino population in California state prisons is 39.1%. That would mean the vast majority of Latino’s in prison are illegal! Latinos make up about 37% of the states population according to the Censes reports. This clearly shows a disproportionate amount of convictions of the Latino population. Are Latino’s more criminally incline than whites? There is no evidence to prove this and it would appear they are just more likely to be convicted of a felony in a court of law. Mr. Hanshaw also claims California has WAY TOO MANY criminals in this state. Are California’s citizens more criminally incline than citizens of other states? It is far more likely that California’s sentencing laws have produced more of its citizens going to prison than any other state in the nation!