For years, we have let the state prisons fester, become grossly overcrowded, and simply continue to pile on ToughOnCrimeTM policies that don’t actually make us safer but do cost us a bunch of money.
Lucas briefly touched on the prison riot over the weekend, but it’s worth a look in its broader context.
Corrections experts warned nearly two years ago that overcrowding at the California Institute for Men at Chino created “a serious disturbance waiting to happen,” foreshadowing the violence that burned a dormitory and injured 175 prisoners over the weekend.
The Chino prison, which houses 5,900 inmates, nearly twice its designed capacity, remained on lockdown Monday and visits were suspended at nine other state prisons from which officers were drawn to help quell the Chino riot Saturday night. Those officers were also helping relocate about 1,000 inmates displaced by the destruction.
The disturbance, reportedly sparked by racial tensions between Latino and black inmates, appeared likely to deal a setback to efforts by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to desegregate the teeming “reception centers” in the state’s 33-prison network that house incoming prisoners and probation violators. (LA Times 8/10/09)
Of course, it isn’t just Chino that experts have warned about for years. The entirety of the prison system, at least the male prison system, is run via a system of segregation. Rather than dealing with the prison gangs and the overcrowding, the CA Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation (hah!) has simply moved the groups that they thought would cause problems into separate compounds. Beyond the throwback to our racist past, there is also the fact that this makes the problem worse. Gangs broken up by racial composition get stronger, and when the inevitable clashes occur, we get extremely violent, and extremely dangerous incidents like this.
While the racial problems in the prisons are profound, they could be handled in a reasonable manner if we had some semblance of control on population. Chino, and countless other prisons around the state, are really too full to properly manage. We are simply hoping that incidents like these don’t occur, rather than actually doing something proactive to prevent them.
It should shock exactly nobody that the federal courts ordered the release of prisoners, the prisons are simply too dangerous, for both the prisoners and the staff. If we fail to control population, these will become all-too-common occurrences.
….as far as I can tell CAians don’t give a rat’s ass about their kid’s education or the future of same. Why pray tell will they care about some ‘roided out tats covered member of AB or Nortenos, eh?
Unless of course they show up in their ‘hood.
Then they might care….
Might…
Great post! I agree that this was entirely predictable…I remember Pete Wilson and other R’s wielding those tough on crime political ads to scare the hell out of the voters into voting for him and new prison construction. The schools be damned, prisoner reform be damned, just lock them up like animals and keep building those prisons! This wedge issue they used for years so as to mask their waning demographic power has now run its course (like prop 13) and we are left with the ruins it has caused to our prisoners, the communities, the countryside, and ourselves as Californians. The irony of all this is that when they do release the now thoroughly hardened criminals via the Federal Court Order, we will see a predictable spike in violence, which might very well breath life back into the R’s insidious wedge issue again. Pat Brown is weeping in his grave.