Backed into a corner by the Supreme Court ruling, some elements of the state government began experimenting with more reasonable policies. Under the rules of a trial program for thirty-five parolees in Sacramento, parole violators were sent back to county jail for a few days instead of to state prison for months.23 Angela Hawken, an associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University who was charged with evaluating the program, called preliminary results “remarkable,” especially in terms of deterring drug use.24 Similar programs were in Hawaii and Washington State.
Roughly two-thirds of California’s ex-cons were reading below a ninth-grade level, in 2006, according to corrections department figures.25 More than half were reading below a seventh-grade level, making them functionally illiterate, unable to read and follow complex written directions.26 A total of 21 percent were reading below a third-grade level.27 If the prison guards were truly interested in dealing seriously with public safety, they’d have advocated programs to improve these statistics. During that same year only 6 percent of California inmates managed to get into academic classes, and 5 percent attended vocational classes.28 In February 2010, Kamala Harris, the Oakland prosecutor who in November 2010 was elected state attorney general, noted, “We know that when you go to prison and come out with no changed circumstances, you are prime to re-offend.”29
The Supreme Court order did nothing to change the ways of district attorneys who, using penalties still on the books, maintained the flow of inmates into the state system. “I think… eventually we will have the same [prison overpopulation] problem,” said Michael Bien, whose law firm in 1990 launched a case addressing the poor mental health care in California prisons.30 Bien’s 1990 suit ultimately led to the 2011 Supreme Court ruling that the state must shrink its prison population by 33,000.31 In one of the many ironies resulting from California’s steroidal Gulag growth, the state cut $587 million in state-funded mental health services in 2009–11, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a patient advocacy group.
Said Laurie Levenson, a criminal law scholar and former federal prosecutor on the faculty at Loyola University in Los Angeles, “We have to stop the insanity of sending nonviolent drug offenders and low-level theft offenders to prison for life. Nobody is saying we should let murderers out.” Michael Romano, head of the Stanford Innocence Project, noted that California inmates were still serving life sentences for stealing a two-dollar pair of socks or twenty-dollar work gloves.32
Still, there were signs that the guards union might be losing its stranglehold on the state’s criminal justice system. The union lost a $12.3 million defamation and breach of contract case after it elbowed out officials in Corrections USA, a national organization of prison guards. A bold bid to spread the union’s power beyond the California border brought its net worth down from $16.5 million in 2006 to $4.7 million in 2010, according to testimony. At the same time, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Nicolaysen testified that the union had still budgeted $6 million the next year for lobbying, political campaign contributions, and advertising.33
The Supreme Court order, quickly followed by the passage of Proposition 36, didn’t right all the wrongs, but a new course may have been set. And like California fashions, the new policies could spread to other states. In 2013 the National Conference of State Legislatures reported that as states strapped for cash began looking for ways to chip away at their oversized prison budgets, thirty-five adult correctional facilities in fifteen states had closed in the previous two years. Texas, Florida, Michigan, and New York each cut their prisoner rosters by more than a thousand prisoners. All had closed prisons in the previous two years.34 It was still too early to tell whether the policy of zero tolerance had reached its peak or, like a bear market on Wall Street, would rise again while tracing a zigzag course toward new highs.
10
Mongo and Squeaky
SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE I THOUGHT ABOUT WRITING THIS BOOK, I DROVE 130 miles from Los Angeles to visit James Allen, the ex-fighter who was then doing time at a no-name private prison holding two thousand inmates in the high desert town of Taft, California. With me was Allen’s trainer, Charlie Gergen. The prison sat along the edge of a dreary town set among scattered oil wells, many sucked dry and no longer cranking. This was a minimum-security institution—no concrete walls, just cyclone fences and razor wire. We passed some guards who had Wackenhut tags sewn onto their gray, wrinkled, mostly ill-fitting uniforms and entered a mournful lobby. A lanky woman in her forties stood at the counter. Let’s call her Squeaky. She was in a guard uniform and had a lined, woebegone face befitting a town where jobs promising wildcatting adventures had been replaced by low-wage employment that required spending days and nights keeping men inside a cage. Squeaky ignored us as we fished blank visitor forms from a basket on the counter and filled them out.
Eventually she approached us and glanced at the forms in a half-interested manner. A flicker of satisfaction crossed the dead mask of her nondescript face. “You can’t go in,” she announced. It turned out that my khaki trousers were forbidden because inmates could also wear khakis, although all the inmates we’d seen from outside the fences wore white pants and shirts. Normally penitentiaries have visitation rules that include, for example, lists of acceptable clothing and what you can have in your pockets, and generally these rules are relatively easy to obtain. But this, the first private prison I’d ever dealt with, treated these rules as though they were top secret. I’d called ahead more than once for the rules, and each time I had been passed from one uninformed, not terribly nice person to another. Some contradicted each other. Others sounded like they were making up answers on the fly. Eventually the line or the thread of the conversation would go dead.
I apologized to Squeaky for my khaki offense and said I had shorts in the car. No, she said, shorts aren’t allowed either. OK, I said, Gergen would go in alone while I tried to scare up other pants in town. She told us to wait, so I scratched the shopping trip and waited. Meanwhile she let other people come and go across the swinging door at the end of her counter. More time passed. We’d been in the lobby practically an hour when she finally walked over to us smiling. I hadn’t seen her smile before and thought it might be a good sign. She pointed to the institutional clock on the wall and said, “Too late.” It was one minute after the hour, so we weren’t eligible to enter, she explained. We hadn’t been told about any admittance deadline, only what time visitors had to leave, which wasn’t for another two hours. Now we realized she’d been toying with us just to reach the sweet spot on the clock.
A word about Wackenhut: Wackenhut is a private security firm that was renamed the GEO Group in 2003. As the GEO Group, it currently runs lockups in fourteen states and is a component of British-based G4S, the world’s largest security company. G4S, a corporate monument to the global bull market in both security and privatization, employs more than 580,000 employees in 110 countries and is the second-largest private-sector employer on the planet, exceeded only by Walmart. Its GEO subsidiary advertises itself as “a world leader in the delivery of private correctional and detention management, community residential re-entry services as well as behavioral and mental health services to federal, state and local government agencies.”1 GEO operates in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Britain, apparently willing to go anywhere there’s a market for English speakers in wrinkled gray uniforms to maintain penal order. I didn’t know any of this when I visited the prison in Taft.