While the guards prospered, state health and social welfare programs were eviscerated, some state roads crumbled into imitations of third world goat paths, and resident tuition at the University of California for the 2011–12 academic year rose 18 percent to $12,150. The University of California had 234,000 students; its sister system, California State University, more than 400,000; and the California Community Colleges more than 2.9 million. Their faculty and staff members numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Yet they lacked the political clout of thirty-three thousand prison guards and parole officers, whose prison system ate up a larger portion of the budget than all three systems of higher education combined.
Brown named as his labor secretary Marty Morgenstern, who’d negotiated earlier lucrative compensation packages for CCPOA while working for Governor Gray Davis. Brown’s personnel director Ronald Yank had served as the union’s attorney. Still, calls for a more reasonable way of handling criminal justice were starting to be heard. For example, a July 7, 2008, NPR report on San Quentin State Prison exposed 360 men whose bunks were stacked in a gymnasium like warehouse merchandise.12 Only a day earlier four prisoners had been injured seriously when a riot broke out in San Quentin’s dining hall.
In February 2010 the San Francisco Chronicle learned that prison officials were planning to shave $250 million from rehabilitation spending in prisons over the next several months.13 They had also dismissed about 850 prison workers who were running programs on substance abuse, anger management, high school equivalency, and marketable skills such as plumbing, horticulture, and graphic arts. News of the cutbacks came from teachers on their way out the door, not the Corrections Department, though it maintained a still-thriving Public Relations Department. At San Quentin State alone, thirteen of nineteen programs were eliminated, reported teachers there, including the high school program. The cuts dramatically demonstrated prison officials’ priorities. The system was disabling programs that could help inmates quit their incarceration cycle.
When Brown took over in January 2011, the prisons were so crammed with humanity that a federal judge in San Francisco found that an average of one inmate per week was dying as a result of medical neglect or malfeasance.14 This, the court ruled, was a cruel and unusual punishment forbidden by the Bill of Rights. Finally, in May 2011 the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, agreed that the inmate total of approximately 143,000 must be cut by around 33,000 within two years.15 The ruling noted that California prisons were built to hold 80,000. An over-the-top legal code guided by prison guards and executed fondly by out-of-control district attorneys had brought the kettle to a boil.
Yet nineteen states, including Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas, had filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the California status quo. The states sought “flexibility” in the face of tight budgets and growing prison populations, and as their brief freely admitted, they feared similar suits might be filed against them.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Sacramento native, joined with the four liberal justices to side against conservatives in this decision. Speaking from the bench, he cited examples of suicidal prisoners being held in “telephone booth-sized cages without toilets.” Others, ill from cancer or in severe pain, died without being examined by a doctor. Sometimes, he said, as many as fifty-four convicts shared a single toilet. He quoted a former Texas prison director who, after touring California lockups, called conditions “appalling,” “inhumane,” and unlike any he’d seen in more than thirty-five years of prison work.16
Yet then–Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley was one of many around the state who predicted a crime wave if minor offenders were let out of prison. Many, he said, “will commit crimes which would never have occurred had they remained in custody.”17
The leader of the California State Senate’s Republican minority, Bob Dutton, argued that California should construct new prisons fast.18 He didn’t say how to pay for these facilities though, and Dutton opposed virtually every effort to close the already immense budget deficit with new taxes. He also suggested that the state pressure the federal government to take custody of thousands of illegal immigrant felons housed in the state system.
Brown, rather than paroling or releasing low-level offenders or reestablishing the rehabilitative programs that had gradually been shed, answered the directive by sending many newly sentenced prisoners to serve their time in county jails not designed for lengthy stays. “Our goal,” said the state’s Secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Matthew Cate, apparently without a trace of irony, “is not to release inmates at all.”19 Yet county jails around the state were already packed, and their finances were a mess.
“California is a victim of its retributive sentencing policies—tough on crime,” said Heidi Rummel, a University of Southern California law professor and former prosecutor. Incarcerating nonviolent offenders into old age “is extraordinarily expensive and probably doesn’t have a significant impact on public safety.”20
Lois Davis, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, said that when the state shifts inmates to counties, it should also shift enough money “to fund the treatment needs of this population.”21 But Brown proposed no additional funding. He and his disciples were like defeated generals planning to mount more attacks with divisions that had been annihilated by the enemy. Someone had to pay the piper for three decades of zero tolerance, but the state government and its fifty-eight counties all sat there waiting for the other guy to pick up the tab.
“What we found,” wrote Rand’s Davis, “is that ex-offenders tend to return to California communities with the least amount of healthcare, mental health and substance abuse resources. So where does that leave us? The state has been unable to meet the medical needs of prisoners, a disproportionate number of whom are afflicted by chronic ailments, so we are going to transfer them to county jails, from which they will eventually be released into the communities that are least able to help them.”22
Even as Brown issued his irrational directives, some sheriffs, like Rod Hoops in San Bernardino County, began releasing low-level offenders and parole violators. The parole offenders hadn’t necessarily committed new crimes. In most cases they’d broken rules, which meant they were supposed to do more time, usually about four months, tacked on in a simple administrative proceeding. In some cases they lost hard-won jobs to do the additional time, and in almost all cases they had no educational or rehabilitation programs open to them while they sat in their cells. The state had been routinely sending seven of ten parolees on a well-worn path to nowhere—back to prison—within three years. It’s not coincidental that the state’s parole officers also belong to the guards union.