As I wrote yesterday, states from California … are mitigating effects of the crisis by closing prisons and experimenting with alternative corrections programs

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I think you might be interested in buying

the program is earning praise. It’s also contributing to the right sort of police statistics; crime is down, the recidivism rate is down, and it’s saving the state between $25 and $30 million a year.

oh sure – that’s what they *want* you to believe. One of the things that made this country great is that we’ve always locked one whole hell of a lot of people up.

btw, they’re not releasing *gasp* marijuana smokers, are they? May be time to break out my Costa Rica Real Estate brochures again….

Would the bridge be in Alaska perchance?

Meaningful prison reform is, sadly, far less certain than an eventual recovery from the economic crisis.

I wish Texas were reforming prisons in some way other than over-filling them beyond capacity.

The prison guards’ union is incredibly powerful here in California. I can’t imagine any reform that would pass muster with them, as they see any threat to the status quo as a threat to their jobs. Why we couldn’t retrain them to be probation officers, or agricultural guards of our largest cash crop, or private security guards for the Owners in the coming Hard Times, I will never understand. They want lots of people in prisons, and that seems to be the reason California keeps lots of people in prisons.

Is it a threat to jobs or a threat to expansion? One wonders if you could just stop expanding prisons as a first step…

Exactly

They’re a huge part of the California Prison Industrial Complex, along with “get tough on crime” legislators and of course the worst gov. south of Alaska and west of SC, Herr Gropenfuhrer

Can’t stick around but …

Up until now there was too much money involved. Everybody won. The CCPOA, the legislators and the govs (including Gray Davis). Prisons got built which meant jobs. And maintained – which meant more jobs. Most of which were built in rural areas. The legs got to look tough, plus they got jobs for their districts – the govs got to look tough, plus they let out the contracts to build the prisons – and the CCPOA got more jobs. California has a more stringent probation and parole system than even Tx. The prison hospital system is descrepit (sp?) Three Strikes was not very well thought out …

I could go on

The California Criminal Justice system needs serious reform

L8r

The Wall Street political gang (GOP) hates taxes but they always think up profitable programs for their pals that require taxes to support them . If that same money was put into teachers and schools there would be much less need to lock up people as long as the Wall Street political gang is not in control because they will refill the jails with more Democrats .

That seems to be the trend in most states. I’m not informed on the relative strength of guards’ unions in different states, but in every article I’ve come across on this topic it’s been the unions crying foul over the loss of jobs, making sensationalist claims to the effect of “everybody go out and get guns cause we’ll have mad dogs loose on the streets.” There comes a point, however, where legislators need to make choices. Economics is spurring the reform here but, as I wrote, there are signs that it’ll persist beyond the recovery. One of the most heartening signs is the comment made by Holder, linked in the post I reference in the first line. If this crisis, and its massive budget hole, aren’t enough to compel California into some substantial changes then I don’t know what it’ll take.
And john in sacramento, I’ve been looking into some investment opportunities and a bridge might be a wonderfell addition to my portfolio. Have your agent get in touch with mine…

Excellent post. I have always wondered why rightists and so-called centrists think that sending criminals off for years of intensive study at what amounts to a graduate school for criminals could conceivably lower crime rates.

To me, being tough on criminals means making sure that they don’t get to commit crimes. Criminals are bullies that like the perceived power they have over others. To fight crime, you have to deprive them of that sort of “power”, show them how pathetic it is, and make them behave like regular people in the community.

Properly funded, intensive community supervision at least has a plausible hope of achieving this sort of change.

Putting criminals in a giant, largely unsupervised crime ghetto and letting them practice drug dealing, fighting, raping, and murdering on each other for several years–while bulking up in a weight room–does not. It would be a joke if it weren’t so awful.

We should out-source the other end of the prison population to Afghanistan. Everybody admits Afghanistan is sorely in need of an industry to earn foreign exchange other than opium – this could be it. We should not impose upon Afghans our prison methods. There are a lot of advantages:
- instead of 30K/yr/prisoner, they can probably get by on 5K, maybe .5K.
- their open air prisons would allow the prisoners to commune with nature year round.
- life sentences would be shorter.
- they would “get right with God” – 5 times a day or else!
- they would have a chance to learn a new language.
- recidivism would definitely go down if this was the alternative.
- our prison guards could be employed in areas more productive to society.

;-)

Hope you didn’t think I was criticizing you. I was criticizing our “leadership” in this state

Here’s an old article but informative

… Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom—like old Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system—now operates at roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future. …

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199812/prisons