I went to prison last week, but it was only for three and a half
hours. And that was enough for me.
I went to prison last week, but it was only for three and a half hours. And that was enough for me.
There is only one word for prison – depressing. When you take a short tour, it’s very easy to be distracted by the well-kept grass, ball fields, the chapel, the dispensary, the high degree of organization or the promise of education and substance abuse programs, along with other accouterments. But the underlying fact is prisons are primarily warehouses for human beings. Inmate movement is tightly controlled. There are the razor, wire-topped, chain-link fences and the active gun towers leave no doubt about where you are.
Steven Smith, experienced in law enforcement and a faculty member at Gavilan College where he teaches Administration of Justice, invited me to join him and 11 of his students on a tour of the state’s Correctional Training Facility at Soledad. The CTF provides housing, programs and services for medium-custody inmates. CTF is almost adjacent to, and often confused with, Salinas Valley State Prison (SVSP), which primarily provides long-term housing and services for maximum-custody male inmates.
Both facilities are part of California’s largest general fund agency, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation with 66,000 employees and a $9.5 billion budget. The department is responsible for 33 adult institutions, six juvenile institutions, 46 adult firefighting conservation camps, and two juvenile camps with an in-state institutional population of 151,635 and more than 100,000 parole cases. Correction and rehabilitation is an expensive proposition – $38,000 a year per inmate-parolee.
The CTF is celebrating its 65th birthday, and there are places in the buildings where its age shows. However, it’s generally well maintained. It’s a strange combination of old structure and modern technology. They have energy-conserving lights but only a minimum of surveillance cameras, and all the cell locks and most of the internal control locks are manually operated with big keys – that’s very labor intensive. I was keenly aware of the constant clunk-clunk of locks, but I wonder if the inmates and staff ever get used to the sound.
It was designed to house 3,312 inmates, one per cell, but last week it had 6,562 on hand, about 200 percent of designed capacity. This is actually a court-ordered reduction from a time when there were more than 7,000 inmates, some occupying so-called “dirty beds” set up in any available space, such as the gym. California has sent 10,358 inmates out of state to Arizona, Mississippi, and Oklahoma to reduce overcrowding, but the average adult male institution remains at 175 percent of designed capacity. The female facilities are not much better at 168 percent.
The staff is comprised of 1,119 custody and 524 support personnel. Custody personnel control and monitor the population until something out of the ordinary happens. Then they respond with calculated levels of intervention and force if necessary to restore order. Everyone understands that the inmates, who sometimes outnumber the unarmed officers hundreds-to-one in a small area, could take over those spaces whenever they want. But then what? The department’s “no hostage policy” means that they are not going anywhere.
Most inmates are housed in cells, and it’s only when you look into a standard cell that the crowded conditions really hit you. It’s tiny with two inmates, two bunks, a sink, a toilet and some personal gear all squeezed into a space of a medium-sized closet. The doors are solid, each with a reinforced glass panel. We visited one large communal housing area in a low-risk unit, and it was bursting at the seams with stacked bunks and inmates – all under the control of only two custodial personnel.
I never studied criminal justice or law but common sense tells me the official purpose of the system is to reduce harm from repeat offenders, bolster the citizens’ confidence in the ability of the government to keep them safe and deter potential criminals. Human psychology tells me that the public sees incarceration as some level of revenge – not an eye for an eye except for the death penalty – but certainly a kick in the butt.
The facility is plastered with signs delineating the rules; don’t go here, out of bounds, don’t reach in the window, take a seat if one is available, etc. Most are also in Spanish, but my bet is that the inmates learn the system’s rules by rote and the signs are mostly a legal requirement when formal enforcement is necessary.
One surprise was the longevity of the correctional staff; several had more than 15 years on the job. Smith told me that the applicant dropout rate was extraordinarily high due to the requirements for written, physical, medical, psychological testing and background investigations. The process typically takes a year, and the state website puts the final acceptance rate at only 3 percent of applicants.
The correctional staff, many loaded down with 30 pounds of gear, exhibited the same type of camaraderie and resigned humor I’ve seen in military units. They are the insiders with common experiences that the outsiders would not understand. After explaining the power of their special pepper spray dispensers, I heard one officer telling her co-workers how she was accidentally peppered-sprayed in the face while trying to break up a fight and they were all laughing at the thought of it.
There are many programs, but most of the money goes into the top two – 53 percent to adult corrections and rehabilitation operations and 12.5 percent to adult medical services. Fifteen percent of the state’s inmate population is now 50 years old or older and this aging population is running up the cost for medical care. Many cells were marked with signs to indicate the inmate within has a disability.
Does it all work? That depends on how you measure success. Incarceration works while the inmate is incarcerated – they are rarely a threat to the public until they are paroled or released. I believe the public, in general, wants to take everything away from the inmates and lock them up forever. The corrections professionals want to be able to use privileges and incentives to manage the population and see life sentences for all but very dangerous offenders as counterproductive and needlessly expensive.
Contrary to popular belief, the percent of admissions for drug offenses has actually fallen from a high of 37 percent in 1999 to 26 percent in 2008. Crimes against both persons and property have risen slightly in the same period to 33 and 27 percent, respectively. Many property crimes are never solved; therefore, no one is incarcerated in those cases.
My sense was that most of the correction professionals believe that failure to treat substance abuse/addiction problems means that many paroled inmates will inevitably be back. Even crimes against persons are, in many cases, an offshoot of substance abuse or addiction. Many people under the influence want to drive a car, fight, or both.
If you measure system effectiveness by the recidivism rate alone, it’s clearly not working. Fifty-five percent, 94,000, of the system’s 171,000 annual admissions are either returned parole violators or parole violators with new felony sentences. With the system stuffed to overflowing, we have nowhere to put these people.
We’re rapidly running out of choices. We can either build expensive new prisons with the latest technology and ADA enhancements to reduce operational costs and relieve overcrowding or we must change our whole philosophy on the confinement and rehabilitation of low- and middle-risk inmates. Corrections is a world the average citizen knows little about, and more early releases will be coming shortly to a town near you.
Marty Richman wrote this for Friday’s Pinnacle. He writes a column Tuesdays in the Free Lance.
