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| California’s Corrections and Politics |
| By Tim Kowal , ordinary-gentlemen.com |
| Published: 06/06/2011 |
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Jailing is big business. California spends approximately $9 billion a year on its correctional system, and hosts one in seven of the nation’s prisoners. It has the largest prison population of any state. The number of correctional facilities, the amount of compensation for their unionized staffs, and the total cost of incarcerating a prisoner in the state—$44,563 a year—have exploded over the past 30 years. Over that same period, the quality of the state’s prison system declined precipitously. From the 1940s to the 1960s, California’s correctional system was the envy of the nation: Its wardens held advanced degrees in social work and wrote groundbreaking studies on prisoner reform and reducing recidivism. “California was the model of good correctional management and inmate programming,” says Joan Petersilia in California’s Correctional Paradox of Excess and Deprivation, 37 Crime & Just. 207, 209 (2008), “and its practices profoundly influenced American corrections for over 30 years.” By the 1980s, however, California began radically reforming its prison system. Prison Population - RateAn incarceration rate that had held to 100 to 150 per 100,000 Californians prior to 1980 spiked to over 450 by the year 2000. The prison population surged from less than 25,000 in 1980 to more than 168,000 in 2009. The state’s prison budget swelled to meet the needs of the more than six-fold population increase. Between 1980 and 2000, California built 23 new prisons. New guards were needed to staff the new facilities, increasing their number from approximately 5,600 to nearly 30,000 over the same period. Prior to construction, annual spending on the state’s correctional program amounted to about $675 million, or about 3% of California’s general fund. By 2008, spending topped $10 billion, and consumed almost 11.5% of the state’s general fund. It still wasn’t enough, however, since spending on rehabilitation was systematically excised from the state’s correctional policy at the same time in around 1980. As a result, according to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002, California has the highest rate of recidivism in the nation: Before the mid-1970s, most sentences were indeterminate, meaning that most inmates could get off much earlier than their original sentence if they completed vocational or academic classes in addition to good behavior. The state replaced that system with one lacking an incentive for inmates to take classes or get counseling to help them prepare for life outside prison. Now, virtually everyone released from prison spends three years on parole. Most – about 71 percent – end up back in prison within 18 months – the nation’s highest recidivism rate and nearly double the average of all other states. According to data provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in 1977, parolees who were returned to prison or convicted of new crimes accounted for just 10% of California’s prison population. The percentage topped 20 only once prior to 1980. In 2009, however, the number was an alarming 77%, having held firm between the high 60s and low 80s since 1986. image Click here to Read More. |
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