California to Release 22,000 Prisoners?

Filed under: Crime, Drugs, Feature — marc moore on December 22, 2007 @ 1:28 am CET

The buzz at the Sacramento Bee is that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will soon ask the state legislature to approve a massive release of prisoners who are thought to be of low risk to the general population:

According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders who are in the final 20 months of their terms.

The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state an estimated $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. The proposal also calls for a reduction of more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of them involving correctional officers.

A gubernatorial spokesman said no final decisions had been made.

The administration, which is looking at across-the-board budget cuts to stem a budget deficit pegged as high as $14 billion, is looking for more savings by shifting lower-risk parolees into what officials describe as a “summary” parole system. Such a shift also would require legislative approval.

Under “summary” parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and would still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on technical violations. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return an offender to prison.

According to UC Berkeley law professor and corrections expert Franklin Zimring the mass release of some 13% of the California penal system’s population is unique in the nation.

“This could be an extraordinarily interesting experiment,” Zimring said. “The nice thing about having a Republican governor do it is that I don’t think there is going to be a firestorm.”

Hhmmm…

“You can guarantee that we’ll be out and yelling against this,” said Nina Salarno Ashford, an executive board member of Crime Victims United of California.

…

“It’s very tragic,” union [California Correctional Peace Officers Association] spokesman Lance Corcoran said. “It’s the exact opposite direction that the state needs to go.”

There’s no word yet on who will be released and when. Given the size of the prisoner pool it almost seems inevitable that one of these already-rotten apples will take a turn for the worse and use his new-found freedom to commit a major crime and become Schwarzenegger’s Willie Horton or Wayne DuMond.

Of course Schwarzenegger has essentially maxed out in his political career, meaning the damage to his future would be minimal anyway.

The problem with the governor’s proposal is that the fundamental issue behind the state’s prison overcrowding problem is that nothing has been done to correct the underlying cause, inappropriately long sentences for drug offenders, many of whom, in my opinion, don’t belong in prison at all.

Nation-wide, approximately 25% of all prisoners are incarcerated because of drug offenses. This statistic, while by turns shocking and silly, actually under-reports the problem because an untold number of other prisoners have been jailed for crimes related directly or indirectly to their drug-related issues.

Another statistic that demonstrates the misguided priorities of our justice system in regard to drug offenders is the fact that, on average, drug-related sentences are 15% longer than those handed down for violent felonies.

In California, the state prison population rose by 700% between 1980 and 2000. According to the report’s authors Maccallair and Terry:

What has driven the growth of the prison system in California over the past two decades is the 25-fold increase in the number of drug offenders sentenced to prison under harsh new state sentencing laws for virtually every offense imaginable. Because of these laws, California now has the highest rate of drug offender incarcerations in the nation - 134 per 100,000. A rate that exceeds states such as Texas and Louisiana, where compassion and sympathy for law breakers is not highly prized (49 per 100,000 and 106 per 100,000 respectively).

Where is the voice of reason that demands that the questions, “Why are we criminalizing the public’s obvious desire to intoxicate themselves with certain substances?” and “Why are we mandating such harsh penalties for non-injurious crimes?”, be asked and answered as a matter of national policy?

While Schwarzenegger’s early release program may have some of the same effects as a rational answer to the question above it seems to me to be going about things in a backwards and foolish fashion.

h/t memeorandum

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1 Interested

December 22, 2007 @ 1:36 am CET

The problem with the governor’s proposal is that the fundamental issue behind the state’s prison overcrowding problem is that nothing has been done to correct the underlying cause,

That’s the problem with our Penal system. Instead of getting to the root of the problem, we remove the individual from society, put them into a situation of being surrounded 24/7 by other societal misfits and expect that the incarceration will somehow cure the problem they started with.

2 Jon Boren

December 22, 2007 @ 6:02 am CET

The problem is not just one thing wrong. It’s multi layered, multi-faceted, and far more insidious than anyone can even imagine. It’s not just about locking people up, it’s a whole corrupt system that allows people to be locked away, because of some financial agenda, masked by the guise of people supposedly needing to be locked up for the reason of "public safety", . Some demented scare tactic put out to the public, as if their immediate well being was in jeapordy with these people being free.
Essentially, it doesnt matter to the public if these people are free, because the people being released are all people that would have been up to be released soon anyway!!! Keepeing them in prison, and believe me, I’ve been there, does nothing to rehabilitate an individual. You only meet more people, network more "connections, gain more negative so called knowledge…
This whole C.D.C. system, was designed essentially to line the pockets of the real criminals,…C.D.C. administrators and their officers, routinely and systematically lie to the federal government about their own draconian practices and ongoing negative and illegal treatment of their prisoners. These are the people sworn to their duties, and been given task, difficult or not, to uphold. his means they should be held to an even higher standard of accountability, not being allwed to just get away with more!?
We’re all being duped by C.D.C., and unfortunately, the public allows itself to be manipulated by propaganda and scare tactics that allows CDC to continue on, and sadly enough be the biggest industry in California today, bigger than Silicon Valley, bigger than the government, bigger than you.

3 wj

December 22, 2007 @ 9:10 am CET

You ask, "Why are we incarcerating these people?"

It’s a long-standing American tradition: to solve a problem of drug use, ban the drug. A century ago, we even went so far as to put a ban on alcohol into the Constitution. Eventually, we figured out that that didn’t work, and took it back out again.

But we have taken the same approach to various other drugs. And, unfortunately, show no signs of recognizing the fact that the approach still doesn’t work. Slow learners, that’s us.

4 Tully

December 22, 2007 @ 4:46 pm CET

The real problem there is California’s MASSIVE BUDGET DEFICIT. The prison system is a side issue.

These offenders may for the most part be in prison for "non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex" offenses, but that’s what they were convicted of, not at all necessarily what they were arrested for. It’s called plea bargaining.

5 CS

December 23, 2007 @ 12:59 am CET

It’s about time we release drug offenders from prisoners, but we need to create programs to help these people so that they will no longer feel the need to use substances to change the way they feel. Hurt people hurt people. We need to try to heal people rather than punish them. Treatment can and does work, maybe not the first time, but plant the seed and let them know there is hope for a better life. I have seen recovery miracles every day. Californians need to care about those who have given up on themselves. Be part of the solution. Prison is a poor solution for drug offenses.

6 CS

December 23, 2007 @ 1:03 am CET

Correction-sorry-I meant to say release drug offenders from PRISON.

7 rich mckone

December 27, 2007 @ 10:03 pm CET

Knowing a few facts can save billions! When you have a few facts, reducing California prison system costs and literally saving billions, is not a very complicated undertaking. Briefly, billions can be saved by: 1. For an immediate fix to prison overcrowding, temporarily revise the Prison Work Incentive Program. The current one-third sentence reduction for low risk inmates can be increased to eliminate the 16,600 prison bed shortfall. 2. Release Requests for Proposals for 16,600 correctional beds to house short term, low risk offenders and technical parole violators. This would be a permanent fix to overcrowding. These two changes save $518 million in annual prison operating costs and avoid spending any of the $6.5 billion in bond funds for unnecessary prison bed construction. 3. The temporary fix to the broken parole revocation system would involve the use of the above community correctional beds to house technical parole violators awaiting revocation action. This change would result in an annual saving of about $.5 billion in prison operating costs. 4. For a permanent fix to the parole system, particularly the revocation system, establish a community corrections program with features similar to successful community corrections programs operated by Minnesota and Oregon since the early 1970s. This change would make the savings in 3 permanent and also end political attacks on any efforts to improve the prison and parole system. These changes would require actual political leadership in dealing with the major prison system problems, the lack of which has allowed an outstanding prison system to deteriorate into an expensive, very flawed. System.