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Progress and Peril in California's Prison Crisis

By Jonathan Simor

Maria Lagos of the SF Chron provided an excellent year start summary and analysis of where things stand with California's both chronic and acute prison crisis. Progress? Only 8,200 prisoners are sleeping in "non-traditional" quarters, like day rooms and gyms, down from 20,000 in 2006. But almost all of this improvement has come from shipping prisoners out of state to public and private prisons elsewhere (Schwarzenegger's major experiment in government by emergency decree), a practice that is both fiscally irresponsible and violations of the right of access to visits by family and friends that that is a component of all non-degrading punishments. Perhaps the most striking point is that the state never built a single additional cell of the 53,000 it authorized back in 2007 in AB900, which was supposed to solve the chronic overcrowding problem through new jail space as well as specialized prison centers for re-entry and for incarcerated mothers...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 10, 2011 (boomark / email).