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.

I’ve been on a real tirade over the prisons lately, mostly because that’s where the really interest analysis has been recently.  (This will be my 4th diary on sentencing reform, the others can be found here in the prisons subject) The SF Chronicle had an editorial today that I somehow missed, so thanks to Tom Hilton.  It’s great:

California’s prison system is a mess: overcrowded and poorly managed, with staffing shortages, abysmal health care, grossly inadequate rehabilitation, job training and drug treatment — and insufficient supervision of parolees. The result, not surprisingly, is a nation-high recidivism rate of 70 percent.

This failed system is a burden on taxpayers, a threat to public safety and an affront to the notion that a civilized society should be doing more than warehousing people in primitive conditions. Those problems do deserve to be treated with the sense of urgency being expressed by Schwarzenegger and Angelides.

However, a state that is struggling to cope with 175,000 inmates needs leaders with the courage to ask a most fundamental question: Do all of those inmates really need to be there at an annual cost of $30,000 each?

One out of four inmates is serving an extended stay under the voter-approved “three strikes” law of 1994, which brings a 25-years-to-life sentence when an ex-convict with two prior convictions of serious or violent felonies commits a third felony of any type.
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Angelides and Schwarzenegger are right about the need to address the immediate crises within our prisons. But the long-term solution must include a restoration of sanity to our sentencing laws by requiring that 25-to-life “third strikes” be serious or violent offenses.

California cannot build its way out of this prisons crisis. Sentencing reform must be part of the equation. It will take bold and informed leadership to make it happen. (SF Chronicle 7/7/06)

The prisons are overcrowded because we have too many prisons.  The Big Taboo of Sentencing refrom must not be taboo for much longer.  It’s an idea that not only should get traction.  It MUST get traction. 

Now, as I’ve said it’s not the only issue: the relationship between the union and management must be resolved. (But note that I don’t think it’s the only or central issue as others do.  Bill Bradley doesn’t think 3 strikes is much of a problem at all, as displayed by his sophomoric and trollish comments on my 3 strikes diary.)

We’ve ceded the moral authority to the right on these issues for too long, and it’s now obvious that they have no more clue what to do about it than we do.  In fact, their ideas are actually harming the state.  We have more prisons now, we spend more money now, yet does it result in lesser crime than say rehabilitation programs?  The answer is an emphatic now.  As I’ve said before, it costs over $16,000 to prevent a violent crime using 3 strikes, but less than $4,000 to prevent a violent crime with prevention and rehabiliation programs.  So, we get the same result for less than a quarter of the price.  Or, if  you want to spend lots of money on it, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea, we get a far greater reduction of crime using preventive programs.  And as a bonus, we get a boost to our economy from additional productive citizens.  Wouldn’t it be better to have these people working towards a better economy alongside us rather than locking them all up and giving them no chance for the future?

We need to get over this lock them up first mentality.  It will not make us safer and it will cost us billions of dollars (beyond the billions it already cost us).  The Big Taboo needs to be honestly discussed, and sooner is better than later.

Phil Angelides announced that he would drastically overhaul the prison system immediately upon being sworn in office. 

Phil Angelides, the Democratic candidate for governor, issued a harsh condemnation of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for the crisis in the state prison system and offered his own expensive plan for expanding the prisons and improving rehabilitation programs.

In a brief stop at the airport in Burbank, Angelides indicated that the prisons were now one of his highest policy priorities, along with education. He charged that the vastly overcrowded prisons were undergoing a “meltdown,” that a major prison riot was a “legitimate worry,” and that his first act as governor, if elected, would be to declare a state of emergency in the corrections system.
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“The governor has put us in a deep hole” because of his inattention to the prison crisis, Angelides asserted. “We are going to have to make the resources available” to provide systemwide fixes. (SF Chronicle 7/7/06)

But while Phhil has endorsed some great ideas, such as increasing funding for youth prevention services, The Big Taboo is ignored:

Joan Petersilia, a prison expert and professor at UC Irvine, said that it was disappointing that neither Angelides nor Schwarzenegger were focusing on what she said was the most important issue in reducing the overpopulation — parole reform.

She said that there are probably 20,000 nonviolent offenders in prison at any one time just for technical parole violations and that these people should be diverted to treatment or rehabilitation programs instead.

“The truth is, it’s only words if you can’t reduce the population, and you can’t get the population down until you get some of the nonviolent offenders, the parole violators, out,” Petersilia said.

We need real structural reform in the prison system.  Look, there are many, many problems with the prison system.  There’s the constant battles between the union and management, there are the health care problems for which the special receiver might raid the general fund, and there’s the overcrowding issue, just to name a few.  But, overcrowding is really the underlining cause of all of these issues.  We just have too  many people in our prisons.  Ms. Petersilia has proposed some changes which would drastically reduce our prison population without seriously jeopardizing our security.  Both candidates would be wise to review sentencing and parole reform, not for the sake of politics, but because it’s good policy.

Today’s California Blog Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Phil Angelides, Arnold Schwarzenegger, CA-04, CA-11, Richard Pombo, John Doolittle, corruption, immigration, environment, health care, prisons, environment, clean money.

Governor’s Race

• OK, today I like Bill Cavala: “Typically, however, columnists who have columns to fill seize upon poll results as facts to be explained – then explain them in terms of information known to dozens of California’s millions of voters.”
• ABC on the Republican Party’s well-coordinated millionaire-financed pro-Schwarzenegger “he’s not as bad for the Environement as Richard Pombo” ads.
• Frank Russo reports that Angelides has accepted eight invitations to debate, and wonders whether Arnold will be gutsy enough to meet Angelides for them. ABC also doubts that Schwarzenegger will have the guts to accept more than one or two, probably only the most scripted of them.
• Follow the money if you want to know who Arnold owes, and who he’ll help.