(Cross-posted on Working Californians)
I can’t believe have to write such an obvious statement. This is why:
The post-partisan governor then proceeded to reject two health-care ideas floating around the Capitol: “Some say it should be market-driven. Others say that government should run the system. The system we have now is market-driven, but it does not work. We have also seen state-run health care in the prisons, and that hasn’t worked.”
I guess that’s why Arnold vetoed SB 840 last year.
The prison system is a complete disaster. Politicians for years have ignored all of the warning signs and pushed off dealing with the problem to another day. Why? Well, frankly there is little incentive for them to address the crumbling system. They are not going to earn more votes by advocating that more money and resources be spent on prisoners. So they didn’t and it fell into further and further disrepair. It took the federal court stepping in for some semblance of momentum towards reform to appear. Even still, Arnold is not addressing it in a comprehensive manner, focusing too much on bricks and mortar and not enough on recidivism rates.
The same cannot be said for a health care system that would cover all Californians. The government would have a vested interest in ensuring that it would work. And every voter would have a stake in the program. Apples to oranges.
Salladay continues:
Finally, the governor concludes in prepared remarks: “But if you take our proposal as a whole, I think you will agree it is the best reform plan anyone has come up with.” [Emphasis added.]
Schwarzenegger is doing what he’s supposed to do – sell his own legislative plan to the public. At the same time, he’s telling the ideological “extremes” on both ends that their ideas are meaningless and they better “jump on board the progress train.” Sounds like ordinary politics.
Post-partisanship is a farce.
Back to the prisons…
It turns out that Arnold has drastically reduced the number of prisoners he is willing to parole who were sentenced to life. Crime victim groups are pleased, but I want to focus on one person in particular he has rejected.
Many, however, may argue that it’s hard to see how 81-year-old Wen Lee is a major threat to public safety.
Lee was convicted of second-degree murder in 1989 after a business dispute led to confrontations with a man to whom Lee had sold his restaurant. Lee had intended to kill the man and then himself, but instead killed the man’s wife. He was found suitable for parole in 2005, when the parole board noted he had no behavior problems in prison, a plan to live with his family upon release and, with several medical problems, was a “very low risk of violence in the community.”
Lee is nearly blind and barely walks, but Arnold believes society is better served by keeping him locked up.
These older prisoners are a significant drain on our prison system. My cousin Jonathan Turley, a law professor at GW, helped review the California prison system in 2003, at the request of the legislature. Unsurprisingly, he found it in complete and utterly disarray. Nearly all of the predictions the study made have come true. Arnold knows about all of this and even met with Jonathan briefly last fall. One of the concrete suggestions made in the study was the creation of a Project for Older Prisoners (POPS) here in California, which is a program Jonathan founded a number of years ago to deal with the nation’s rising population of older and geriatric prisoners.
Part of the solution to our prison crisis is finding a way to reduce the prison population. One of the ways to accomplish that goal is to make “risk-based decision that select the lowest-risk individuals for release.” From Jonathan’s op-ed in the LAT last fall.
Among the various factors, the most reliable is age. As a general rule, people become less dangerous as they age. In males, the greatest drop in recidivism occurs around age 30 and tends to continue to fall. In addition to their lower risk, older prisoners impose much higher costs on the system. Because of maintenance and medical costs, the average cost of an older prisoner is two to three times that of a younger prisoner.
Many years ago I created the Project for Older Prisoners, or POPS, to deal with the nation’s rising population of older and geriatric prisoners. In California, the number of prisoners 55 and older has doubled since 1997. Today, there are almost 20,000 prisoners over 50, including 717 over 70.
Prisoners like Lee have an extremely low risk of offending again. We will be paying a significant amount of money to provide for his medical care while he is locked up. Building more beds to house people like him does not make fiscal sense.
To make matters even worse, studies have shown that prisoners are physiologically 10 years older than they are chronologically. Inmates are becoming more demanding and costly because of their physiological age, producing ballooning hidden costs.
In 2003, POPS proposed a risk-based approach in dealing with the state’s burgeoning older prisoner population.
Remember, this was proposed four years ago. If Arnold’s parole decisions are anything to go by, they have not adopted the recommendations. Here are the components of a POPS program:
- Establishment of POPS programs through law schools – a move recommended years ago by the governor’s task force. POPS students are trained to identify and evaluate low-risk prisoners within the system.
- Creation of a system for the supervised release of low-risk, high-cost prisoners.
- Creation of alternative forms of incarceration for mid-risk prisoners. Many prisoners can be placed into electronic bracelet programs that can reduce the daily costs of incarceration from $65 a day to roughly $10.
- Establishment of geriatric units for high-risk, older prisoners. More than 50% of the costs of maintaining prisoners are attributed to the salaries and packages of correctional officers. Decrease the number of guards, you decrease the per capita cost of inmates. Although a geriatric prisoner may still be a risk for a given category of crime, he is unlikely to toss his walker over a razor-wire fence or outrun perimeter guards.
(emphasis mine)
The benefits to such a system are numerous and they have been proven effective in other locations.
Such a system can lower costs, improve care for inmates and reduce crime by making room for more dangerous, younger prisoners. For example, by placing older prisoners into special units, the state can slash medical costs by having staff trained to recognize and deal with gerontological disease before they become acute conditions.
Such a system could result in the removal of hundreds or even thousands of prisoners from the system – quickly. Although politicians love to speak of fighting for victims, they have refused to act to prevent people from becoming victims in the first place. If California leaders want to be “tough on crime,” they will have to make tough decisions. If they are finally ready, they should look first to their aging prison population.
This is a cost saving move, with low risks to the state. Keeping blind 81 year old men locked up in the general prison population simply does not make sense. Being “tough on crime” does not mean we have to act irrationally. We have wasted enough time by not dealing with this issue. We are now at a crisis point. They must act. Unfortunately, Arnold is still locked up in sticking to the tough guy shtick rather than using his brain.
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