California Gov. Schwarzenneger and Attorney General Jerry Brown are
firing blanks at the messenger heralding the disaster that California prisons have become. Both the governor and attorney general asked U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson to remove J. Clark Kelso, who was appointed receiver of prison healthcare three years ago by Henderson, and return inmate medical care to state control. Schwarzenneger and Brown complain that Kelso is going to spend $8 billion to build a gold-plated health system. However, their ploy to remove Kelso probably won’t work.
Let’s set aside whether Kelso’s $8 billion plan is a good one or not and instead look at how we got into this mess and whether we’re anywhere near getting out of it. The last question is easy to answer. Judge Henderson appointed Kelso because prison healthcare in California was terrible. There’s no evidence to show that it’s improved, nor that it will any time soon, considering the state’s multibillion-dollar deficit. Why would Henderson suddenly remove the receiver when nothing has changed?
How did we get into this mess? That’s easy, too. The politicians and people of California created it by foolishly thinking that they could punish crime away — without giving any consideration to the ultimate cost and impossibility of such a plan.
With rehabilitation almost nonexistent – the public and politicians never wanted to pay for that – recidivism remains at more than 66 percent. Two out of every three people released from California prisons go back – the highest rate in the nation. Politicians and the public thought they could scrimp on health care, drug treatment, rehabilitation, education – anything that might benefit the lives of inmates once they were released because, well, they’re inmates and they deserve only the worst. Only 7 percent of inmates receive alcohol treatment, although 42 percent have a high need for it. And only 2.5 percent of inmates who have a serious need for drug treatment actually get it. And even for those who get treatment in prison, aftercare programs when they’re on parole are wholly inadequate.
The fact is that inmates are wards of the state and the people of the state are responsible for their welfare – all 172,000 of them. The people of California have volunteered to take care of as many inmates as possible, and now they’re complaining about the cost. Maybe Californians should have thought of that before they embarked on their prison-building binge while incarcerating as many people as possible. Since 1977, about 1,000 laws have been passed increasing penalties for all sorts of crimes. California politicians run for office by touting how they got tough on crime by increasing prison sentences. And the public eats it up.
Crime rates are lower in California than they were when we started our prison building and people punishing obsession. But they are lower
everywhere, including in states that didn’t try to throw everybody behind bars. Nobody’s exactly sure why crime goes up and down.
But one thing is sure: Californians chose an impossibly expensive way to fight crime. And now, we don’t want to pay for the program we chose and we don’t have the political will to create real change. The result will be continued billions of dollars in costs for prisons (more than we pay for higher education), continued high recidivism rates and large-scale inmate releases as the system we chose collapses.
That collapse is upon us. A panel of three judges is considering whether to cap the population and release up to 52,000 inmates – with almost no rehabilitative or re-entry programs in place for them.
This whole thing is dumb public policy, folks. A child could devise a better plan.