Cramming Our Prisons Till They Pop

by Tony Chavira

When you break the law, you get treated like a naughty child and given a timeout. At least, that was the original intention of jail. These days, it’s a timeout that’s overcrowded to the point of being a septic tank, where all walks of naughty live in constant fear of being murdered, beaten or raped. Adults on the Supreme Court decided that it just wasn’t right (or unconstitutional), and ordered that over 33,000 offenders be transferred out.

But where? And how? Even if California weren’t so pathetically broke from years of pulling out loans to pay for debts and vice versa, this would still be a problem. The California penal system tends to sentence offenders of all sorts for longer periods of time than most other states, and California offenders also tend to have a higher recidivism rate due to violations of technical parole rules. If parolees don’t read all the fine print, there’s not a slap on the wrist. Even nonviolent, nonsexual offenders (see: potheads). They go right back into jail to rot or whatever ... most people don’t care, as long as they’re not walking around free.

We have a system that is more interested in locking people up than finding appropriate rehabilitative responses to what they’ve done. In some cases, the appropriate response might be prison, but in others, maybe there is a less costly, more effective way to approach punishment and rehabilitation. Hawaii had the same problem but now uses a progressive probation system called Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) that seems to work pretty well for them.

One of the biggest problems is that California’s legal system’s has this arbitrary rule called “Three Strikes.” If you’re convicted three times, you get a way longer prison sentence. But there are some weird assumptions that go with the idea of “Three Strikes” ... like, why three? Isn’t one strike already a sign that the criminal probably needs some sort of intervention? We already know that 78.3% of those filed away to jail return within three years, so what’s the point of letting them get a pass at number two? If I were already an offender, don’t you think I’d be strategic enough to know that my second crime would “only be my second strike”?

By the time someone gets to conviction number three the system looks like a fucking joke. If we already know that jail time doesn’t deter someone from committing a crime, what the hell will more jail time do? Super-duper convince them? Flaw-gic abounds here, and everyone pays for it: you and I in dollars, criminals with years of their life, and society when better-trained villains are dumped back on their streets after long bouts in the slammer.

This also begs the question, what’s the point of putting criminals in jail? “To pay their debt to society”? That’s fucking stupid and isn’t even an answer. We created the rules for how to get in, and we create the rules for how to get out. They aren’t arbitrary, but they don’t answer the question of what the “point” is. Do we put criminals in jail to “make them pay!” or to socially readjust them? Do we dump them in jail to forget about them until they’re out and committing new crimes, or do we try to fix them before they come back out?

San Quentin

Who are these people we’re putting in jail? Are they evildoers with no redeemable value, plotting evildoings and hatching diabolical schemes? That question’s easy to answer: people in jail are either poor and desperate, disturbed and psychotic, or a savory blend of both. Being in prison makes these people more depressed, more suspicious, more aggressive and less in touch with how things work in free society. So let’s lock ’em up and throw away the keys! On the televised cartoon Futurama, year 3000 Judge Ron Whitey cannot send people to the Institute for Criminally Insane Humans. Why? Because (as the bailiff put it) “that facility has been full ever since you declared that being poor was a mental illness.” At least cartoon judges have the guts to codify it.

Hawai’i’s probation reform program is one way to keep nonviolent, nonsexual offenders from passing go without going directly to jail. Analysts and pundits are finally trying to see if the HOPE program can work for us, and it seems pretty good to most, especially when they can tout statistics like “60% of probation officers feel that HOPE has lead to effective success” and “in one year, 80% those convicted of methamphetamine-related crimes were both on the street and clean.”

HOPE’s GPS device program would cost the state nearer to $5 per day than the $100 per day we spend on shacking lesser criminals up in the dog pound. With that money freed up, we’d be able to better distribute resources, focus more funding on very disturbed or very violent cases, and maybe even improve our prison educational and psychiatric services without overloading them. If the offenders aren’t violent and are less likely to repeat their offenses, what’s the harm in trying the program out?

The problem is that some people think Hawaiian criminals are totally lame compared to badass Californian criminals. These people also don’t give a shit about prisoners once they’re in jail. One of those people is Assemblyman Steve Knight, who recently said that he was “not very happy” with the Supreme Court’s decision. Seriously, that’s what he said. Instead, what will make him happy is if “when you go to prison, we want you to serve your time.” Thanks, Steve, but that answer doesn’t address what to do with them once you’ve tossed them away. Nor does it address address why so many people are sentenced to hard prison time when California is experiencing a record low crime rate.

Granted, he does have an answer for that in his interview with Warren Olney on KCRW, and I shall quote Steve verbatim (it’s at the 21:43 mark): “we have a population in prison right now that, if they were out, they would be doing those [crimes].” In other words, “We’re all safe as long as those bastards are locked up, so keep them in jail forever! The more the merrier!” It doesn’t matter that California’s at five times our classic level of incarceration. Or that education may be way more effective than jail, since completing high school reduces the chances of going to jail by about 76% for whites and a head-exploding 340% for blacks. Or that Californian judges tend to sentence criminals to disproportionately long prison terms. Or even that only California and (no one’s surprised) Florida hold the American records for two of the longest criminal sentences in history! Don’t read dumb ol’ facts! Throwing people in prison doesn’t cost anything, and any money we spend must be well worth it to keep those naughty villains in jail!

Quit being afraid of naughty villains and be adults already, Californians. Some of these guys need an education, others just need some monitoring. Only a few very serious criminals deserve to be in prison, and once they get there they need the services to turn them into people who can actually function in society, instead of people who go back out there and crime-it-up some more. Besides, we’re broke and there just isn’t enough space or money to store 33,000 inmates until their terms end. We can either keep raising taxes to keep building new prisons to indefinitely house more $50,000-tax-dollar-per-year inmates, or we can learn to be more responsible toward citizens who commit petty crimes and approach criminal activity progressively.

The Supreme Court simply slapped the stupid look off our politician’s faces with something we all knew: that we can’t torture prisoners (well, U.S. citizens anyway). But that ruling’s only thrust more adult reality onto our childish lock-’em-up notions of incarceration.

The more people we toss into the clink, the more expensive it’s gonna get. Deal with it. Besides, they’re just criminals, not diabolical villains, and we seem just fine letting our supervillains walk around scot free.

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