Joan Petersilia, a woman who I mentioned in this diary about the Chronicle’s editorial on 3 Strikes reform, has lashed out at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s misguided prison reform. She feels, like many other prison experts, that simply building more prisons will never be sufficient to control California’s prison population.
Joan Petersilia, a nationally recognized authority on prison reform and a consultant to the state corrections department, described the plan for a wave of prison expansion that the governor released on Friday — just as his reelection campaign gears up — as unworkable, poorly thought out and out of touch with research that she and others have done in recent years on cost-efficient rehabilitation methods.
“I think anybody who understands the situation we’re in has got to be mystified by this report,” said Petersilia, who runs a state-funded institute on prison reform at UC Irvine. “It’s looking backward, not forward.”
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Petersilia ridiculed the idea, in large part because, she said, it would probably not be possible to build the prisons fast enough to keep up with what is expected to be continuous growth in the inmate population. Prisons are at nearly double their capacity.
“The plan, to me, is a fantasy,” she said.
Another penal expert, Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, in Oakland, said that over the previous several decades the state has expanded prison capacity 300 percent — but at the same time the inmate population increased 800 percent.
The focus should be on treating and rehabilitating inmates so they stay out of prison, he said, rather than incarcerating them over and over. Other experts agreed.
“Pick any study done by any criminal justice expert in the last 20 years, and they will talk about sentencing reform, or parole reform,” said Dan MacAllair, executive director of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “This doesn’t address any of that.” (SF Chronicle 7/11/06)
Sentencing reform must be the central element of any prison reform plan. So far, talk of this Big Taboo has been scarce. However, it now appears that the Chronicle is on board for the conversation. One hopes (the one being me) that the Chronicle’s recent pursuit of the real story of the prisons will make sentencing reform a real issue.
And Schwarzenegger then has to come back with, “well, yeah, I got some sentencing reform in my plan.” Here’s his big vision on the subject:
“I can understand where some people are coming from — when you look at the numbers, it looks like we’re just building beds,” said Jim Tilton. “But there are parts of this that represent real change.”
Tilton said proposals to shift female inmates into community-based facilities and open other programs designed to provide job-training and other services to inmates about to be paroled were based on successful reforms other states had implemented.
That’s it? Moving around a few women (who are a small minority of prionsers) and a few job-training programs? That’s what Arnold comes up with? We need a massive restructuring of how we lock people up, why we lock people up, and what we do with them once we lock them up. Arnold’s plan does none of that. It nibbles at the corners by bringing a few good ideas in, but ignores the central concept of sentencing and parole reform. We just can’t keep locking up millions of people. It’s just not tenable.
