Examining California's prison crisis: Where we're at, how it happened and what we can do

Clayton J.

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Examining California's prison crisis: Where we're at, how it happened and what we can do

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Abstract

Even without the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression on hand, California's notoriously dysfunctional prison system requires a much needed in-depth examination. More so, California requires much needed action in a very different direction from the consistent trends of the past 30 years which have lead up to and caused its current condition of utter defect. With the current US and world economic crisis looming, the prison catastrophe is now in urgent need of reconfiguration. To solve this fiasco we must look at what conditions cause the prisons to be seen as abhorrent by many, how it has come to these conditions, what the government and contemporary politicians are doing about it, and, conversely, what they should be doing about it to fix it not merely temporarily, but for good.

Introduction
Non-partisan oversight agency of the California
Overhauling the entire prison system
The prison of California
Fiscal problems of the California prison system
The issue of over-crowding
The kind of treatments
Conclusion

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[...] The US is roughly equal in the rates of drug use and nonviolent crime to those in other “advanced industrialized countries,” yet it relies on an incarceration rate that is five to ten times higher than those other countries (Nadelmann). With the most population of any state in the nation and the third largest economy in the world just below the US itself, California serves as a microcosm to the problems the US faces regarding criminality and its prisons systems. [...]

[...] However, the issue of overcrowding is not simply about comfort, it involves the prisoners' and guards' health, safety, efficiency and ability to implement programs such as rehab, education and vocational training. 2005, after a federal judge found that an inmate a week was dying due to incompetence or inadequate care, he placed the prison health care system under a court-appointed administrator” (Sterngold 34). Since prisons are at nearly double capacity, almost every aspect of prison life is strained. Not only are the prisons physically built to house less than half of its current occupants, they are meant to service, protect, guard, feed, provide medical attention, and more to half the number of prisoners they are being forced to do due to overcrowding. [...]

[...] While many may not have sympathy for ruthless killers and rapists, we must remember that there are many smaller infractions one can be sent to prison for and these people must suffer along with the more extreme cases. Another major consequence of overcrowding is its inhibition effect it has on the rehabilitation, re-entry, and vocational training programs that can help prisoners to not repeat offend which would reduce overcrowding as well. More than 16,000 prisoners sleep in gymnasiums and classrooms where these programs are intended to take place (“packing them These spaces were built with the intention of helping inmates to a smoother assimilation into civilian life. [...]

[...] What is even more troublesome is that these official fiscal numbers under the label of “corrections” do not cover the entire amount of expenditure the state will spend on the prison system. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature agreed to spend an additional $ 7.7 billion to add new beds to ease mass overcrowding and the state will spend an another billion to improve health care for prisoners--as mandated by a federal case declaring the prison health care system to be unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment denying cruel and unusual punishment (Sterngold 34, Weisberg). [...]

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