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Prison and Jail Reform

California's jails and prisons have mushroomed in the last quarter century, far outpacing population growth, and at the expense of more effective community corrections alternatives to incarceration. Now jails and prisons threaten to continue a bureaucracy-driven expansion even as other methods of dealing with crime and violence prove more successful. FCL is working for strong bi-partisan efforts to shrink the prison population back to more reasonable levels.

The non-partisan State Legislative Analyst has developed options to reduce prison populations that would make up to $423 million available for other approaches to crime.

It is also clear that California's system of imprisonment has suffered from chronic mis-management over the years:

• Millions of dollars have been paid to abused prisoners and prison employees who have sued the state
• hundreds of thousands of unprepared parolees have been recycled back to their communities without any provision for re-integrative support such as a "half-way" house; many of them are returned to custody for "technical" violations
• thousands of prisoners are spending their time in idleness.
• some 25 thousand prisoners are mentally ill and in need of treatment rather than imprisonment.

The powerful guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, appears resistive to any transformation of prisons, and budget constraints have been used to justify a do-little stance.

For links to criminal justice reform research, see

• Criminal Justice Initiative -- Open Society Institute's home page on reducing the excessive reliance on punishment and incarceration
• Correctional Education Connections -- govt., education, juvenile justice &law related links
• Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice -- a provider of services and research on alternatives to incarceration
• Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) -- slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment; what happens when you put good people in an evil place?
• Drug policy and imprisonment -- treatment is the better approach; how is California doing?.
• Imprisonment of African-Americans
• Theoretical perspectives"

For information about Prison Administration, see:

• National Institute of Corrections
• CA Youth and Adult Correctional Agency
• CA Department of Corrections

For current legislation affecting prisons, see FCL bill summaries.

Books:

• Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (Reed--2002) edited by Marc Mauer contains 16 essays from respected criminologists and sociologists focuses on issues that often get neglected: "Black Economic Progress in the Era of Mass Imprisonment"; "The House of the Dead: Tuberculosis and Incarceration"; "Entrepreneurial Corrections: Incarceration as a Business;" and investigate the impact of incarceration on the social and material life of the families and communities from which prisoners are taken.
• The Expanding Prison--The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (Pilgrim Press--1998) by David Caylye, a Canadian radio journalist, documents the perceptions and realities in crime policy, the failure of imprisonment to meet its goals, and the interaction of politicians and the press on issues of corrections policy.
• A Sin Against the Future--Imprisonment in the World (Northeastern University Press--1998) by Vivian Stern, a research fellow at Kings College, London, traces the evolution of punishment and the record of prisons as deformed societies, and places of corruption, violence, and abuses of human rights.
• No Escape--Male Rape in US Prisons(Human Rights Watch--2001) reports on the nationwide problem of sexual abuse in prisons, and the steps that can be taken to reduce its incidence.