June 2, 2011 | 1:58 PM | By

Why some reformers embrace crisis

FILED UNDER: Courts, Budget, Prison Overcrowding, Realignment

Josh Dimauro

With the US Supreme Court ruling that California must relieve overcrowding in its prison system, the current plan embraced by Governor Jerry Brown and his administration is to send thousands of prison inmates to county jails to serve their sentences. Today, a piece by the excellent reporter Justine Sharrock over at New America Media points out that some counties do not seem ready to accept those inmates. Primarily, Sharrock points to “the Los Angeles problem:”

Of all the counties, Los Angeles County will play the most significant role in the realignment program, since one-third, or nearly 57,000, California state prisoners originate from that area.

L.A. County jails, which house an estimated 19,500 inmates daily, have 5,000 unused beds. The Pitchess Detention Center north of Santa Clarita, for example, houses only two inmates. (Those two inmates serve to maintain the jail’s open status, to avoid any upgrades that would be required if the jail were to close and reopen.)

If realignment goes through, certain counties, like Los Angles, Kern, and San Diego, will likely face a huge influx of inmates. And, Sharrock reports, conditions in LA jails are questionable as it is–meaning, if inmates were in overcrowded, sub-constitutional conditions in prison, nothing better awaits them at the county level.

Similar arguments have been put forth when talking about shrinking the Division of Juvenile Justice (formerly California Youth Authority), another tenet of Brown’s plan to tighten state corrections. The alternative, sending kids to county-run lock-ups, leaves them vulnerable to local conditions, which in some areas of the state, may be worse than the well-funded and recently overhauled state system.

So why do many prison reformers embrace Brown’s plan to bring inmates to the local level? One big reason is this: many believe that people don’t care about whether or not the criminal justice system is working properly until it’s in their face. Most people don’t have to deal with prisons–how to pay for them, how to keep them functioning to constitutional standards, how to keep them running safely for inmates and correctional officers–so people focus on more immediate problems to their lives. As juvenile justice reformer James Bell once said during an interview, “you know what the number one political lobby in San Francisco is? Pet owners. You talk about changing the dog walking paths, and get thousands of calls. But no one cares about a fair and equitable justice system.”

So many prison reformers have embraced Brown’s plan. With a return of responsibility to the county level, the hope in these circles is that hysteria over thousands of inmates returning to their home counties–and the proximity of the problem, opposed to the far-off “prison overcrowding” issue–will breed creativity about how to restructure the justice system to keep the incarcerated population smaller. Chaos brings attention, and attention, they hope, brings reform.

  • Skeeter1959

    The sad but true fact is that since the appointment of a Special Master to oversee the Correctional Health Care Delivery System (how inmates access health care) The cost and waste of this system has skyrocketed. Incarcerated felons in this state have far far better access to health care than virtually any free citizen. Inmates are routinely transported to outside hospitals for care that used to be provided by on duty physicians. Make one wonder why we as taxpayers are still paying “physicians” when all they do is triage and transport inmate out.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Phillips-Claire/1061170101 Phillips Claire

    Kicking the convict down the roadBy Paul Sutton
    As a professor of criminal justice, I am writing this during my 100th weeklong tour of California prisons. The tour is visiting eight prisons in five days. Today (May 26) was San Quentin, normally peaceful but the scene of a riot four days ago. Tomorrow, I lead 24 San Diego State criminal justice students into Folsom State Prison and Cal State Prison at Sacramento, which six days ago had its worst riot in 15 years.I was in Pelican Bay State Prison on the day, 20 years ago, that the court ordered California to do something about the state’s deplorable prison conditions and inmate crowding. Coincidentally, I was in California Men’s Colony on the day (May 23) when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its most recent decision to force the state to find a solution to the problems the courts had recognized a generation before. In the interim, the debate has seen more heat than progress. U-T reporter Matthew Hall’s piece (“Court rules state must cut prison population,” May 24) has raised some interesting points and has generated much additional heat – much of it symptomatic of why so little has changed over so many years when so much has needed to change. Much of the debate misses the point, and much of the interchange is based on bias, racism, prejudice and ignorance. That is both understandable and tragic.There are many problems and many issues. They are both substantial and imminent. They will not be solved without careful and thoughtful discussion. And the forging of remedies simply cannot and must not be left to politicians or practitioners, if we are to find our way out of our current mess.There are many aspects to this problem. The issues include big considerations like sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, budgets, the nature of incarceration and so on. Those are critical and must be part of any solution. But there are other, obvious things, that no one is addressing. Perhaps those who know better are best served in this debate by keeping the public in the dark about certain critical realities and to let us argue about the irrelevant and benign. At the heart of the matter, for example, is the issue of so-called realignment, i.e., moving inmates from state prisons to county jails. Despite the funding and logistical problems such a proposal raises, no one is addressing the plain fact that county jails in California are simply not equipped to handle offenders sentenced to longer terms than those offenders they currently hold. They not only don’t have the room, the staff, the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure, the philosophy, the training or the architectural requisites to do what realignment expects or demands them to do. Simply put, jails were not built, intended or capable of holding massive numbers of felons for long periods of time. That is what prisons – however badly – were designed to do. And however convenient it might be to solve the state prison crowding problem by shifting the burden from the state’s prisons to the ill-equipped and already overburdened county jail systems, it is a terrible idea. It is worse than “kicking the can (of correctional problems) down the road.” It is literally the problem of kicking the convict down the road. And that will not help the problem, the public or the convict. Things will be worse, as a result, plain and simple. Los Angeles and San Diego are responsible for most of our state’s inmate population. Accordingly, they will be the likely target of most of the realignment. Over the past 30 years, I have visited and studied most of the jails in San Diego County and the largest of those in Los Angeles County. I have been in and out of most of the prisons in California – from RJD (Richard J. Donovan) on the Mexican border all the way to Pelican Bay on the Oregon border – 100 times. I have seen the best and worst of both worlds – jails and prisons. And they are very different worlds. Each does some things well and some things poorly. We are proposing to shift tens of thousands of people from one system that is designed for one thing into a system that is designed to do an entirely different thing. That is folly. It is as if everything believes – without knowing better or caring – that a bed is a bed, a cell is a cell, and a lockup is a lockup; that any one of them is as good – or bad – as any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: they are very, very different. And saying they are equally competent to do the same things does not make them so. Until someone with some sense – and some authority – stands up and makes that point loudly and clearly, we condemn ourselves to even more frustration, waste, expense, public harm and human suffering than our current correctional system has wrought for generations. Sutton is a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University. He has written, spoken and produced documentary films about California prisons. He has conducted weeklong tours of California prisons for more than 2,000 of his students for nearly 30 years.