Emptying the prison cells
California’s prison system may be headed in a remarkable direction. Serious challenges remain, but the state corrections empire intends to get smaller, cheaper and possibly better for inmates.
The reversal has a number of causes. Federal courts are demanding that state lockups be less crowded and unhealthy. Gov. Jerry Brown is eager to save money from a system whose costs have soared to nearly 8 percent of the state budget.
Also, crime rates have diminished across the board. That shift gives the public a breather from safety worries that fueled tougher laws, longer sentences and billions spent on prison construction.
These factors lie behind a major overhaul of corrections policies designed to save billions and remake the sprawling 33-prison system. The changes would halt some prison construction projects, shutter one facility and bring back some 9,500 inmates from out-of-state lockups. A proposal for a new inmate medical prison would go forward to meet legal challenges. In addition, months-old “realignment’’ policies that have shipped some 20,000 lowrisk inmates to county facilities would continue.
A smaller prison system — down from 140,000 inmates to just more than 110,000 — still isn’t guaranteed. Federal judges, who oversee prison health care, need to be convinced that the new system will mean better mental health and medical treatment. The reduced population would still be larger than the level ordered by other court decrees and far above original designed capacity, as prisoner rights groups note.
Another factor will be the state’s powerful prison guards union, which has grown in size and influence through two decades of prison building and steady support for state officeholders. For now the labor group is noncommittal on the reductions unveiled on Monday by corrections chief Matthew Cate, though the plan was careful to include an end to using out-of-state private prisons, a practice the guards union has long opposed.
Finally, there’s a political threshold of legislative approval and a public vote in November on taxes favored by Brown that include money for local jails where many inmates are being sent. Plenty remains to be done to remake the corrections bureaucracy, especially around the hot-button issue of crime and punishment.
Still, if all these obstacles are overcome, it could be a new era for the state prison system. Some $30 billion over the next decade could be saved. Crowding and poor medical and health care could be improved.
Any of these improvements would be a major achievement for what has become a broken and costly public obligation.