Chickens eventually do come home to roost

For the last 20 years I’ve known that one day I would write this column— just as sure as the sun rises in the East... and God makes little green apples. This is one of those “I hate to say, I told you so” pieces. In what has to be one of the biggest “Duhhh” s in U.S. penal history, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is strongly considering opening the prison gates and releasing 22,000 “low-risk” offenders in 2008. Why? To save his state from going bankrupt, that’s why.

It didn’t take a crystal ball to predict — from as far back as the early 70s when politicians began building their careers on “lock ‘um up and throw away the key” demagoguery — that the bill for our foolish and wrongheaded incarceration policies would one day come due. That bill has finally arrived, due and payable next year and it’s all because of budget-busting overcrowding. Recently The Pew Center on the States, a Washington, DC-based research organization released new data in a study entitled “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008.” That’s the number of adult males incarcerated in the US, making us the most imprisoned country on earth.

Politicians who falsely promised the citizenry safety and security via Draconian incarceration policies omitted one fairly obvious fact: Prisons are a very, very expensive proposition, especially when they are used for social control and to deliver medical and mental health treatment services... instead of exclusively being used for their originally intended purpose: To house individuals who pose a danger to society. The vast majority of prisoners in California — and virtually every other state — are behind bars not because they pose a danger to society and the commonweal, but because we have failed to construct a social safety net for the human failures our system of government has created by balancing budgets on the backs of the poor.

“I don’t think we’re getting the worst drug lords into the prisons,” said Kentucky State Justice Secretary J. Michael Brown to a Senate committee last month. “We’re just getting the people who went out and got caught. It’s the low-hanging fruit “

We have this huge national appetite for locking up people we don’t like, whose behavior we don’t approve of ... and those we just happen to be mad at. Many of the highest grossing movies of all time are horror flicks ... because we just love to be terrified. Terror is the only emotion that cuts through our ennui. And, realizing this, politicians manipulate our fears and emotions to get us to sign onto all sorts of policies that produce little benefit — except for the politicians and the prison/industrial complex.

We also have this huge propensity for allowing our manipulating legislators to create unfunded mandates. We just love to listen to them shout “I’m going to lock all of those people up to make you and your family safe!” But they know full well they are lying through their teeth. But when the bill comes due to house and feed this growing population we don’t want to reach down into our pockets and put our money where their mouths are because we don’t feel any safer.

According to The Sacramento Bee, the “Schwarzenegger administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders who are in the final 20 months of their terms. The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state an estimated $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. The proposal also calls for a reduction of more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of them involving correctional officers.” A spokesperson for the governor said that a final decision has yet to be made. It pays to keep in mind that California is a bellwether state in matters regarding incarceration; the issues officials there are confronted with today will bedevil officials in other states across the nation in a not too distant tomorrow.

Schwarzenegger’s administration is looking at across-the-board budget cuts to stem a projected deficit predicted to potentially be as high as $14 billion, created in large part by decades of “three strikes” laws that have California prisons busting at the seams. Laws that, by the way, have never live up to their billing in terms of making citizens there any safer.

Officials there are also looking for additional savings by shifting lower-risk parolees into what they describe as a "summary" parole system, which would require legislative approval. Under "summary" parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and would still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on technical violations. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return an offender to prison. A summary parole system t would save the state an estimated $98 million in the 2008-09 fiscal year and $329 million through 2009-10. The number of job cuts in the parole proposal would hit 1,660.

With a corrections budget of $9.9 billion annually, California needs to cut spending by 10 percent per year, but the state must also satisfy a panel of three federal judges who are breathing down their necks for overcrowded conditions that border on cruel and unusual punishment. They are threatening legal action to cap the prison population, which currently stands at 172,079. Over the last decade the state has built seven new prisons and no new universities, and the last thing officials want to do is to continue to build more. If the feds take over the state prison system the financial ramifications for California could prove cataclysmic. Default could loom on the horizon.

Corrections officials in California and elsewhere have finally come to the conclusion that no state can simply “build” and “incarcerate” its way out of its crime problems — the only real answers are to find methods of reducing the number of criminals created in a given state by poverty and wrongheaded social and educational policies.

Of course conservatives and victims-rights groups in California are fit to be tied. They say the proposed release poses a massive public safety threat. Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, accused Schwarzenegger of "running with his tails between his legs" from the three federal judges. "I can guarantee you that we'll be out in force yelling against this," said Nina Salarno Ashford, an executive board member of Crime Victims United of California.

However, Brad Seldon, an Oakland-based prison activist said that conservatives fail to differentiate between types of crimes and levels of severity. “I don’t want violent criminals returned to society early either,” he said. “In fact, some of them should never be released, but with most of these low-level offenders being considered for release under this currently proposed program, the only ‘victims’ were themselves. In the majority these are drug abusers who never should have been incarcerated in the first place... they should have stayed in the community and received treatment, which is a far less expensive proposition and has a far greater chance of actually solving the problem. We’ve proven over and over that except for dangerous and violent offenders, incarceration simply does not work. But we Americans have this punitive streak in us that we can’t get rid of, and politicians just love to take advantage of it to get themselves elected.”

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
Comments? LettersATCoolCleveland.com (:divend:)