As California finds itself nearly bankrupt, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to drastically cut inmate rehabilitative programs. This budget crisis has led state officials to disregard common sense and long-term strategy as guiding principles for prison policy-making.
Already few and far between, rehabilitative programs are improve inmates’ chances of making orderly returns to society. Eliminating them is not just counter-intuitive, but also potentially disastrous to public safety. To cut overall prison spending by $1.2 billion, the state will reduce by $250 million its spending on inmate drug rehabilitation, academic and vocational programs. The CDRC will lay off 1,443 rehabilitative program employees and naively hopes that community volunteers will help fill those empty spots.
The decision to nearly eliminate important inmate programs is not only bad judgment driven by fiscal desperation, it is also potentially disastrous considering the current explosive mix of overcrowding, racial tensions and prison gang politics. It should be added that inmates would have even less access to programs that offer rehabilitation through learning and fewer available daytime activities, except all things gang related. Across the state, more and increasingly violent prison riots are to be expected. Prison gang activity is likely to increase as gangs fill the daytime void left by disappearing inmate programs.
Prisons are not isolated from outside society and what happens in prison affect people outside. It is therefore important to realize how removing rehabilitative program will reverberate throughout California and impact public safety.
Who flips the prison bill?
California has a long history of getting tough-on-crime. The state’s sentencing and parole laws are among the toughest in the nation and have often been initiated by voters in ballot initiatives such as the Three-Strikes-Law. As voting constituents wants leaders who promise to be tough-on-crime, all but a few state politicians reinforce California's unsustainable practice of mass-incarceration. But the current budget crisis offers a potentially educational opportunity for Californians to look at how much their unforgiving criminal justice system really cost and realize that they are the ones paying for it.
California’s prison time-suits-all approach to sentencing is unsustainable because the state simply cannot afford to pay $49,000 annually per inmate. That is five times the amount spent annually on a student in public schools. Instead of locking up every petty thief, drug abuser and other nonviolent offender, the state could of course spend that money more wisely. Even with the planned $1.2 billion cut in corrections budget, the state will spend about $10 billion of taxpayer money on prisons in the next fiscal year.
But in the end, solving the prison crisis is less a matter of money than it is a matter of priorities. Without any real direction, the state will continue to spend billions of dollars in ways that eventually only make us less safe and the prisons system more dysfunctional. Most people think the state should spend its money on things that are proven to work. In this case, these are the drug rehabilitation, vocational training and academic programs. Prison and community-based rehabilitative programs are the most effective way to ensure that released nonviolent inmates stay out of prison and thus the best way to increase public safety in the long term.
A revolving door
At the center of California’s problematic prison system is the inmate recidivism rate, which is the highest in the nation. This revolving prison door literally sends 70 percent of released inmates right back to prison. Recognizing what aspects of the system are responsible for the high recidivism rates, tells us how the state can solve the prison crisis.
California’s strict parole laws place all released felons, regardless of the nature of his or her offense, under tight post-release supervision. It usually only takes a simple misstep for a parolee to be sent back to prison for parole violations. As a result, California’s prison system is so overcrowded that inmates are often stacked in rows of three level bunk beds that line gymnasiums activity rooms and old classrooms. Currently at about 170,000, California’s inmate population is housed in 33 facilities with a capacity to hold 88,000. Since October 2006, California has moved close to 10,500 inmates to private for-profit prisons in other states.
Whereas strict parole laws return a large majority on released inmates to prison, the lack of access to inmate rehabilitation programs on the inside leaves most inmates insufficiently prepared to meet challenges in the outside world. Equally scarce and underfunded are community programs that help transition inmates back into the communities once they are released.
Despite evidence that rehabilitative programs are very effective in rehabilitating inmates and lowering recidivism rates, those already underfunded programs are being slashed. By cutting program staff and funding by nearly half, the state is leaving only $350 million for its inmate programs. Ironically, the CDCR recently released a report on the effectiveness of drug rehabilitation programs, which only highlights the absurdity of its decision to eliminate such programs.
Unaffordable
California cannot build itself out of the prison-overcrowding crisis. The state cannot afford to spend more and more of taxpayer money on a dysfunctional prison system that deteriorates public safety. Keeping things the way they are amounts to spending an increasingly bigger portion of the state's budget on new prison facilities that rack up even higher operating costs.
A new approach is needed that pulls California’s head out of the sand and puts rehabilitation at the center of California’s criminal justice system. This crisis will not solve itself but requires a rethinking of policies so corrections budget allocations align with what is in the best interest of the people. Without reforms, the overcrowding crisis will worsen and the corrections budget will continue to divulge more and more of taxpayer money meant for education, healthcare, roads and other essential projects.
Daniel Harju
USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
