How not to run a prison system, as demonstrated by Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Golden State." />
James Sterngold" />
July 21" /> , 2008" />
Early on a bright, chilly January morning, Donald Specter walks into a soaring, wood-paneled federal courtroom in San Francisco. Standing before a judge in the nearly empty chamber, Specter begins to relentlessly pick apart a series of guards and administrators from nearby San Quentin State Prison. Slender, with thinning hair, plain glasses, and a gray beard in need of a trim, the 56-year-old strikes an unassuming presence. He speaks in such low-key tones that I strain to hear him at times, and his constant fumbling of papers gives him an absentminded air. Yet few people have more insight into the workings—or rather, the failings—of California's vast, violent corrections system.
As prison officials take the stand, Specter bores into them about the dismal state of death row at the maximum-security lockup, which is currently at 157 percent capacity. First, there is the question of cleaning supplies: Staffers explain in tedious detail the procedures for purchasing soap, brushes, and buckets, yet can't say whether inmates actually receive them. A plant manager insists that the bird droppings littering the cell block aren't a problem, even though the state has described them as "excessive." An hour is spent on laundry; an official admits he does not know why many death-row inmates wash their clothing and sheets in the toilets. This is followed by a lengthy discussion of whether the law library is adequately stocked.
This mind-numbing dissection of the prison's inner workings (which went on to include a discussion of the "stalactites of slime" growing in the showers) displays the uniquely dysfunctional way that California manages its desperately overcrowded, shockingly expensive prisons. Which is to say that it doesn't—Specter does. He's not a warden or a state employee, but a public interest lawyer who heads the Prison Law Office, an inmate-rights organization whose tiny size gives no hint of its outsized influence. Over the past 32 years, it has won a long string of class action lawsuits against the state. Judges have repeatedly found that California has violated the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment and ordered sweeping improvements. In each case, the Prison Law Office has won the right to oversee the fixes, which can take ages; the case heard in January is about 29 years old. Specter and his 11 colleagues currently oversee court orders covering medical, dental, and mental health care for inmates; disabled prisoners; the parole system; and juvenile prisons, among others. The firm's $3 million budget is largely supplied by the state, which has to pay the plaintiffs' fees every time it loses a case, which is just about every time.
"We don't like to say it, but they practically run things," explains Jeanne Woodford, who went from being a guard at San Quentin to becoming its warden and then the head of the state corrections department under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger until she quit in frustration two years ago. "The bureaucracy, the way it is structured, cannot keep up with what they have to do at all. Under the normal process, it takes a year to change a rule, a simple rule. The court says, 'Do this,' and you just do it. Believe me, we'd get none of the resources we really need if it weren't for the litigation and the Prison Law Office."
Even James Tilton, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, admitted in an interview before his sudden resignation in April that Specter's work serves a purpose. "I'm trying to break that old system down," he said, "but there are some areas where the litigation can be helpful."
Specter doesn't embrace the burden of reforming the prison system one lawsuit at a time, but he sees little alternative. "I've tried persuasion," he says. "We tried coercion. We've tried the press. I haven't found anything else except litigation and the courts. As frustrating as litigation is, it's the only thing that I've seen that's effective—and it's not very effective."
california's archipelago of 33 prisons houses more than 170,000 inmates, nearly twice the number it was designed to safely hold. Almost all of its facilities are bursting at the seams: More than 16,000 prisoners sleep on what are known as "ugly beds"—extra bunks stuffed into cells, gyms, dayrooms, and hallways. Schwarzenegger has referred to the system as a "powder keg"; in October 2006, he declared a state of emergency, citing the effects of overcrowding—electrical blackouts, sewage spills, dozens of riots, and more than 1,600 attacks on prison guards in the previous year. Last year, a nonpartisan state oversight agency declared the prison system to be "in a tailspin that threatens public safety and raises the risk of fiscal disaster."
There is little disagreement that the status quo is unsustainable, yet the system just keeps on ballooning. Even as Schwarzenegger has promised reform, the corrections budget has exploded during his term, from $4.7 billion in fiscal 2004 to nearly $10 billion in fiscal 2007, or about $49,000 for each adult inmate. In contrast, the 220,000-student University of California system gets less than $4 billion annually. The prisons' operating costs do not include the $7.7 billion that Schwarzenegger and the Legislature have agreed to spend on adding thousands of new beds to ease overcrowding. Nor does it include the additional $7 billion the state will spend to improve health care for prisoners—as mandated by yet another federal case won by the Prison Law Office.
Meanwhile, services for prisoners have all but collapsed, from literacy classes (nearly one-fifth of California's inmates leave prison totally illiterate despite a law mandating that they read at a ninth-grade level before release) to medical care. In 2005, after a federal judge found that an inmate a week was dying due to incompetence or inadequate care, he placed the prison health care system under a court-appointed administrator. "This statistic, awful as it is, barely provides a window into the waste of human life occurring behind California's prison walls," wrote the exasperated judge.
Since peaking in 1992, the state's violent crime rate has dropped 53 percent. Even if the drop can be attributed to fewer criminals on the streets—which some experts dispute—it does not fully explain why the prison population has nearly doubled since 1990. The number of inmates entering prison with new felony convictions has not risen much in the past decade; last year, around 34 percent of the 139,000 incoming inmates had new convictions. But a startling 51 percent of the new admissions were parole violators, mostly serving brief sentences for breaking their terms of release. At any given moment, about 11 percent of all California prisoners are parolees back behind bars for technical violations. The state has the highest recidivism rate in the country, close to 70 percent—compared with about 50 percent nationwide.
California's ills are exceptional, but they provide a warning about the enormous costs of a system singularly focused on punishment over rehabilitation. For more than three decades, California has been trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle where putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has become the answer to every new crime to capture the public's attention—from drug dealing and gangbanging to tragic child abductions. Spurred on by a powerful prison guards' union and politicians afraid of looking soft on crime, corrections has become a bottomless pit, where countless lives and dollars disappear year after year. And now that it has metastasized to the point where even a tough-guy governor and the guards agree that the prisons must be downsized or else (see "Taming of the Screws"), every attempt at change seems stymied by inertia. The sheer size of the system has become the biggest obstacle to finding alternatives to warehousing criminals without preparing them for anything more than another cycle of incarceration. "The public believes the prison population reflects the crime rate," says James Austin, a corrections consultant who has served on several prison-reform panels in California. "That's just not true. It's because of California's policies and the way it runs the system."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/slammed-worst-of-the-worst.html
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