Prison Crisis: Will California Spend More on Jails Than Universities?

[RedEarth]

Prison Crisis: Will California Spend More on Jails Than Universities?

By Sasha Abramsky, In These Times. Posted October 23, 2007.



As the number of prisoners in California prisons explodes, the state may soon spend more locking up its citizens than on public university education.
........

California's experiment in wholesale incarceration is one of the great policy failures of our times. Thirty years ago, California had 12 prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, after a generation of "tough-on-crime" legislation pushed through the legislature and the initiative process -- from three-strikes-and-you're-out to draconian anti-drug and anti-gang legislation -- the state has close to 175,000 inmates living in 34 prisons. That means almost one in every 200 California residents is now a prisoner of the state. (And these numbers don't even include the tens of thousands more prisoners in county jails.) The annual cost to taxpayers is about $10 billion per year, just shy of the amount the state annually puts into its vaunted public university system. If current spending trends continue, California will soon be spending more on prisons than on universities.

Despite the massive funding, scandals have rocked the prison system since the '90s. At the Corcoran Supermax, guards organized "gladiatorial combats" between rival gang members on the prison yard and would end the fights by shooting the antagonists apart with rubber bullets. Faced with criminal investigations and a media outcry, correctional administrators promised top-to-bottom reform. They failed to deliver.

The state's youth authority has also been beset by scandals, with videos surfacing that show gangs of officers severely beating juvenile detainees. Large numbers of teens have been held in lockdown conditions that make it impossible for them to attend school. Not too many years ago, close to 10,000 teenagers and young adults under the age of 25 were held in these state-run, youth authority institutions, which were supposed to emphasize education and intensive rehabilitation. In practice, they have become little more than warehouses for young people whom the state has given up on. Today, these institutions hold only 2,500 teenagers and young adults, and current plans envision scaling the number to 1,500. Increasingly, as courts have lost confidence in the state system, juvenile offenders are instead being channeled into juvenile halls run by counties.

What's more, in the past decade, the state signed deeply unpopular sweetheart contracts with the politically powerful prison officers' trade union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA). (The base salary for a long-time CCPOA member is now $73,000, and with overtime, many officers earn more than $100,000 a year.)

Perhaps most damning, by the early years of the century, California had a return-to-prison rate for parolees near 70 percent, which was worse than any other state. By contrast, as of December 2006, Florida's return-to-prison rate was 53 percent, New York's was 56 percent and Texas' was 25 percent, according to data collected by the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California at Irvine.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/65868/

[bluestateguy]

1. Overpaid prison guards

I suspect that a prison guard probably makes more money than an assistant professor at a UC or CSU school.

Pathetic.