United States | California's overcrowded prisons

Gulags in the sun

The consequences of three decades of being “tough on crime”

APCruel and unusual
|Los angeles

AP

Cruel and unusual

ALL night they battled. Hispanic inmates on one side, blacks on the other, they smashed glass to use the shards as knives and ripped off pipes for bludgeons, burning down part of the prison and injuring hundreds. The riot on August 8th-9th was not the first and won't be the last in California's dreadful prison system.

It occurred in a prison in Chino, just east of Los Angeles, that houses nearly twice as many inmates as it was built for, about the same degree of overcrowding that plagues California's 33 prisons as a whole. It is also one of the prisons that are currently trying to implement a 2005 ruling by the Supreme Court that inmates must not be segregated by race.

The overcrowding in California's prisons, by far the worst in the country with only Georgia and Alabama coming close, has been the subject of lawsuits for years. The latest riot came just days after three federal judges, calling conditions “appalling,” ordered California to prepare, within 45 days, a plan to bring its prison population down to 137% of capacity in order to approach constitutional standards of decency. Jerry Brown, California's attorney-general as well as a former governor and likely candidate for governor, has vowed to fight the order.

In the past three decades, California's penal system “has gone from one of the best to one of the worst in the world”, says Joan Petersilia, an expert on prisons at Stanford Law School. In the 1960s and 1970s, California was a model for its success in rehabilitating criminals.

But in 1976 California decided to switch from “indeterminate” to “determinate” sentencing. The first system, emphasising rehabilitation, gives a lot of discretion to parole boards, who can reward good behaviour and also help with overcrowding by reducing inmates' prison time. Determinate sentencing, on the other hand, reflects a philosophy of deterrence and means that prison time is relatively fixed, whether an inmate behaves well or badly.

Since then, California has passed around a thousand laws mandating tougher sentencing. Many have gone through the legislature, where politicians of both parties compete to be “toughest on crime”. Others have come directly from voters, who often bring a “crime-of-the-week mentality” to the ballot box, says Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a think-tank in Oakland.

The result is a disaster, says Ms Petersilia. California spends $49,000 a year on each prisoner, almost twice the national average. But it still has the country's worst rate of recidivism, with 70% of people who leave prison ending up back in it, compared with 40% in America as a whole.

The new prisons built in the 1990s to help accommodate the prisoners serving these tougher sentences have also helped contribute to the state's fiscal crisis. Last month's desperate deal between the governor and the legislature to balance the budget includes cuts of $1.2 billion from prisons, but many Republicans are objecting to the implication that 27,000 prisoners will have to be released to make these savings. For the time being, California's prisoners remain crammed together—with predictable results.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Gulags in the sun"

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