Editorial: Time to get real on prison crowding

The Sacramento Bee
PUBLISHED FRIDAY, SEP. 25, 2009

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team continue to suffer from
multiple-policy disorder on prison overcrowding.

On one side, the governor declares a state of emergency and says it is
absolutely possible to reduce prison population without harming public
safety.

On the other side, his administration presents a plan to a three-judge
federal court panel that says population reductions "cannot be accomplished
without unacceptably compromising public safety."

This latest proposal, turned into the court last Friday, is make-believe
and won’t fool anyone. The aim is supposed to be to get California’s 33
prisons – designed for 80,000 prisoners – down to 137.5 percent of capacity
over two years. That requires going from 150,000 today to 110,000 inmates
by July 2011.

Yet the Schwarzenegger administration presented a largely "build it and
they will come" strategy, instead of a population reduction strategy. The
plan relies heavily on construction – 764 beds the first year, 2,364 the
second year, 3,904 the third year, 12,500 the fourth year, 16,150 the fifth
year and 18,650 in the sixth year. Yeah, right.

The judges already have expressed deep skepticism about this in their
August opinion, calling construction a merely "theoretical remedy" when
everyone knows that construction remains "years away." They question
whether construction of new prison space is "an actual, feasible,
sufficiently timely remedy."

Second, the Schwarzenegger plan relies on sending more inmates to
out-of-state prisons (1,250 the first year, 2,200 the second and 2,500 each
year after). It also relies on turning foreign prisoners with deportation
orders over to the federal government (300 in the first year and 600 each
year after). Yet these options make hardly a dent in the prison population.

Only a couple of elements in the plan mark real reductions in California’s
state prison population: Expanding "good time" credits for inmates who
follow prison rules and participate in education or work programs, and
diverting technical parole violators to community correctional systems
rather than incarcerating them in state prison for a few months.

And one element is totally missing from the Schwarzenegger package that the
court should consider: The need to enforce the state’s existing law on
early medical release.

Assembly Bill 1539 by Assemblyman Paul Krekorian, D-Burbank, signed into
law by Schwarzenegger in 2007, established a process to release inmates who
are unable to perform activities of basic daily living inside a prison and
who pose no threat to public safety.

Yet fewer than a dozen prisoners a year are released. State prisons are not
supposed to be long-term health care providers for elderly, ill prisoners
who pose no threat to society.

The Schwarzenegger administration’s perfunctory plan shows that it will not
go the extra mile to reduce prison population.

It does show, however, that he intends to go the extra mile to appeal the
overcrowding case to the U.S. Supreme Court. His priorities are exactly
backward.