California’s prison systems are not only overcrowded and impacted but also face issues including, but not limited to: the overall jail conditions, excessive force against prisoners, parolee rights, and medical and health care rights and there have been many court cases discussing each of these topics. On top of these main issues that I’ll be discussing throughout my paper, California also has a very high spending rate on their prisons.
Our prisons conditions have been a large trend for other states, and the U.S as a whole. “The state’s large and diverse population, large size, large urban areas, high rates of violent crime, criminal street gangs, tough sentencing laws and its status as an entry point to the U.S. for both immigrants and drugs has given California a large and complex prison environment.” (wikipedia)
California holds the title of being one of the most expensive prison systems in the United States. According to Kurt Snibbe from The Mercury News, the annual cost to incarcerate one single inmate in a California prison is approximately $70,810 which makes us a close second behind New Jersey as claimed by a study done in 2016.
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Compared to the previous study done in 2012 that shows $31,286 per prisoner, its not hard to recognize that our prison spending rates are continuing to rise throughout the years. These rates are based off many facility operations and health care services such as maintenance of inmate records, medical care, psychiatric services, and academic education programs to list a few. Our current prison facilities are at more than 150 percent of their designed capacity according to the same article by The Mercury News.
Overcrowding is one of the largest issues for California prisons currently. Because the prisons are so impacted, the state took a vote in 2011 and passed a realignment bill. The goal of this bill was to try to reduce the prison population. Impaction causes issues such as limited space, cramming, and the inability of giving out proper medical care assessment to the prisoners. That same year, the court had also ordered another case against overcrowding, known as Plata versus Brown.
As stated by an article from Wikipedia, “Brown v. Plata was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that a court-mandated population limit was necessary to remedy a violation of prisoners’ Eighth Amendment constitutional rights.” California had then been ordered by the court to reduce their overcrowding due to these amendment violations. California was asked to reduce their crowding from 200 percent of capacity to 137.5 percent, as stated by an article by Robin Respaut.
Although, less spending and overcrowding does sound like a good thing on the surface, some consequences did arise from Brown vs. Plata being passed. According to the same article by Robin Respaut, after three years of making the changes, the state has reduced some inmate population but the spending costs have continued to rise. Respaut says, “The price tag for housing, feeding and caring for a prisoner in California has climbed to almost $64,000 annually, up from $49,000 five years ago.
Per prisoner, the state spends more than three times the amount it did 20 years ago when the population was a similar size.” In fact, our state spends more than double the amount we spend on students. In addition to these statements about cost, an article written by Tamara Tabo begins by stating, “The consequences of Brown vs. Plata are nothing to dismiss.” She then continues with, “Releasing criminal offenders into mainstream society to avoid prison overcrowding means . . . increasing the number of criminal offenders in mainstream society.”
Tabo lists that California’s murder, rape, burglary, and theft/auto-theft crime rates increased drastically since Brown vs. Plata came into effect and some prisoners were released. A quote from Michele Hanisee, president of the Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys, says, “The most recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show violent crime rates in some California cities has increased by over 50 percent. . .If you look at the national data, our violent crime rates are going up faster than the rest of the nation.”
Excessive force against inmates is another large issue in California state prisons. Tony Saavedra wrote, “Guards at California prisons violated policy in nearly half the instances they used force on inmates during a six-month period in 2017, state investigators have concluded.” The same article continues to explain that in approximately 48 percent of the 3,709 incidents reported, the guards had failed to abide by the rules.
In another instance, on April 17, 2018, Christopher Zoukis reported that a 43-year old woman named Karen Carter was rewarded $149,000 by a federal jury upon finding out that jail guards had used excessive force against her. As her story goes, her arms and fingers were not only unnecessarily twisted and pulled on but she was also slammed on the ground, held down, and beaten for several minutes, and then was left alone in a cell chained to a restraint chair for two and a half hours. Carter proceeded to sue and ultimately had won. Furthermore, a court case titled Madrid vs. Gomez was filed and passed in attempts at alleviating these conditions.
California is a very diverse state. We have a majority minority population. From an article by PPIC it is said that, by the end of 2016 that 29% of the male prisoners in our state prisons were said to be African American, but only 6% of the state’s male residents are African American, 1,028 Latino men, and 335 of other races. That being said, the same article claims that 420 white men per ever 100,000 are imprisoned which equals out to .42%. (PPIC)
These statistics unfortunately created issues in society, especially on social medias. Social medias currently are flooded with angry and sometimes violent posts against the prison system and against cops as well for accusations of racist intent. Social media users, especially on sites like Twitter, continue to upload videos of police brutality and unfair punishments against primarily black cultures, but also against hispanic and islamic cultures as well.
These posts became a widespread issue that enraged many across the world and also sparked the uprising movement of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter was an international activist movement that protested against these violent and racist acts against black people. The group regularly attempts to broadcast the large amounts of police killings, unnecessary aggression, profiling, and basic inequality currently happening.
Unfortunately, people were so angered by theses happenings that it led to violence and even murder of some law enforcement officers. In addition to that, another group was sparked and called Blue Lives Matter. The Blue Lives Matter was a countermovement that targeted these police killings and stated those in charge of causing harm to police should be charged with hate crime. “Although criticized by the ACLU and others, the movement paved the way for a state law in Louisiana that made it a hate crime to target police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical service personnel.”(wikipedia)
Overall, interest groups like FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums) are urging that Congress doesn’t wait to fix the system and impose a change. In short, they want the judge to choose the convicted person’s sentencing length rather than having a set amount of time based on a certain offense. This plays into my discussion because in some ways, it may contribute to fixing the overcrowding issue by allowing some cases to be short lived despite their charges which then means less time spent in an already impacted prison. In an opposing view, some believe that there should not be easier sentencing based off of overcrowding but instead that we find a different solution to our systems issues. The dilemma of this controversy is unfortunately not knowing what to do in order to adhere to both sides. There are positives and negatives to each side and it is difficult to find a balanced in between on this specific topic.
Although overcrowding, over spending, and mistreatment in cruel or unusual ways are all very valid reasons for wanting to change the punishments or sentences of inmates and releasing some of them to free up space, the other side holds many negatives that people in California do not want, such as higher crime rates and “slap on the wrist” sentences for those committing the crimes. Furthermore, the money spent on our systems has continued to rise despite reliving some of our inmates early. Therefore the problem remains that without higher taxes and more money spending, no prisons can be built or made more spacious, and without shorter, easier sentences, the prisons will be unable to provide the proper, legal amount of care and space for inmates.
This topic fits under a social order vs. freedom type of problem because it is important to maintain social order by giving punishment for crimes, but equally, it is important that we do not mistreat or abuse that power to the point that we remove the inmates basic freedoms as an American human. A compromise that may work in the future would be.
Works Cited
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_California
- https://www.insidecdcr.ca.gov/2014/12/unlocking-history-explore-san-quentin-the-states-oldest-prison/
- https://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Plata
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-prison-budget-insight-idUSKBN0UK0J520160106
- https://abovethelaw.com/2013/10/the-consequences-of-brown-v-plata-are-nothing-to-dismiss-the-california-prison-case-continues/
- https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/18/california-prison-guards-violate-rules-for-using-force-on-prisoners-half-the-time-report-shows/)
- https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/apr/17/california-woman-awarded-149400-excessive-force-jail-officials/
- https://www.foxnews.com/us/did-california-prison-reform-lead-to-an-increase-in-crime
- http://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-changing-prison-population/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lives_Matter
- https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/18/california-prison-guards-violate-rules-for-using-force-on-prisoners-half-the-time-report-shows/
