Gitmo West

Picture, if you will, the following “harrowing [prison] conditions, including holding suicidal inmates for hours in cages without toilets, forcing them to stand in pools of their own urine. Why? Waits for needed mental health care lasted as long as a year, and in the meantime there was no place else to put at-risk prisoners. Suicide rates were 80% higher than in prisons in other states. Sick inmates died of readily treatable illnesses. Contracting a disease meant in some cases being rounded up into a cell of 50 other sick inmates.” Los Angeles Times (Times Editorial Board), April 16^th. Mexico? India? How about California?! The above description came from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his 2011 Brown vs. Plata opinion looking at conditions across the board in California’s prisons. The pictures above are very real.

Control over the California prison system was transferred to federal judicial supervision, but years later, the overcrowding and underfunding that led to the above abuses has not exactly been corrected. There are still 9,000 prisoners in California’s 33 prisons above the maximum capacity required under a federal court order. But California Governor Jerry Brown is still asking the courts to remove that federal judicial supervision, that the chronic horrors described by Justice Kennedy have been remedied.

9,000 over limits seems to be within tolerable parameters until you understand that the courts already allowed California capacity well in excess of the standards under which these prisons were built: “The cap on inmates ordered by federal judges — 110,000 in facilities designed to hold 80,000 — was not some random and unimportant figure but was designed to ensure that California no longer provided the kind of treatment that is more often seen in Third World dictatorships than in civilized democracies.

“So although it may be the case, as Brown asserts, that California prisons are now a model for prisoner care, having reduced the inmate population by about 40,000 and having boosted spending on medical and mental health care, it’s too late to argue that the job is finished without the state actually coming close to the inmate population target. It’s not unreasonable for the courts to insist on it, or to remain unmoved by the progress without a good-faith demonstration that the administration can and will sustain it over the long term — by bringing the number of inmates closer in line with the capacity of the system to hold them.” LA Times.

California is usually associated with left of center politics. Jerry Brown is a Democrat. Humane treatment, consumer protection and environmental consciousness seem out of step with California’s “worse than Gitmo” prison system. But the budget cuts that have slammed this state, even as taxes are staggeringly high, making the state’s proclivity to impose long sentences for too many crimes, half of which are drug-related, completely impractical. Sure, the court ordered inmate reduction pushed Texas past California as the nation’s largest prison system, but California is still a blueprint for disaster.

Including its civil courts, the California judicial system is the largest in the world, eclipsing entire nations with vastly larger populations. The United States is watching its already out-of-control prison system continue to grow, putting pressure facilities that cannot house the increase. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States has a quarter of the global inmate population. The problem, of course, is that legislatures are loath to reduce sentencing structures for fear of being viewed as soft on crime.

Even California’s notorious ballot initiative system failed to remove the hideously expensive death penalty laws in the state, a multiple of the cost of incarcerating an inmate for life without the possibility of parole. “California has spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since it was reinstated in 1978 (about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out)…California spends an additional $184 million on the death penalty per year because of the additional costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row, and legal representation.” DeathPenalty.org.

Perhaps if voters were presented with “tough on crime” legislation with specific tax assessments against taxpayers for every “yes” vote they make! We are clearly addicted to incarceration, low on rehabilitation and treatment, beyond anything within international standards. And yet we don’t want to pay for our addiction. Funny, what do courts do to addicts who can’t afford the cost of their “needs”?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you cannot afford your habits of the past, perhaps it’s time to do a ground-up reexamination of the habits themselves.