California ends use of out-of-state prisons after 13 years

SACRAMENTO — Thirteen years after California began exporting thousands of felons to private prisons across the nation, the last convict boarded a bus back to California on Tuesday.

"This is an historic day for corrections, to be out of the out-of-state business," said Corrections Secretary Ralph Diaz.

It's important, he said, "to get them closer to their loved ones, because we realize that the family plays a huge role in their rehabilitation."

To make room for returning inmates, California shed nearly 50,000 inmates from its in-state prisons as voters and lawmakers eased criminal penalties and began housing lower-level criminals in county jails instead of state lockups.

Then-gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger started shipping the inmates out of state in 2006 in what was supposed to be a temporary, stopgap alternative to freeing inmates from prisons so crowded that nearly 20,000 inmates were bunked three-deep in gymnasiums and dayrooms.

"When he did that, we thought, 'OK, let's go,'" recalled Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office.

The prisons that year reached an all-time high of 173,479 inmates, more than double their design capacity. Specter and other inmate advocates won the creation of a special panel of three federal judges who eventually ruled that prisons were so jammed that they imperiled sick and mentally ill inmates.

"They had nothing to do all day and couldn't be protected from other people who preyed on them. Every nook and cranny was being filled with beds and even hallways for a time," Specter said.

Diaz, who was then a correctional captain, remembers the problems that caused.

"Trying to find activities (for inmates) that had meaning and purpose ... just with the sheer numbers that were inside the institutions, it was very difficult," he recalled.