Left, right join to say: Cut prisons, not schools
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Friday, April 8, 2011
(04-08) 04:00 PDT Washington - -- With cash-strapped California hosting the nation's largest prison population, an unusual left-right coalition said Thursday it wants to slash state spending on prisons rather than cut school budgets.
At a news conference in Washington, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous joined anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, California correctional officers union chief Mike Jiminez, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and others to argue that prison spending costs taxpayers a fortune, damages the state's economic future and does little to improve public safety.
The U.S. prison population stands at 2.3 million, with African Americans making up about a quarter of that. America's incarceration rates are higher than South Africa's were at the peak of apartheid, according to an NAACP study.
170,000 prisoners
As part of the campaign, the NAACP is putting up billboards in Los Angeles and Houston, which say: "Welcome to America, home to 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners."
California's prison population, now at 170,000, grew 500 percent from 1982 to 2000. State prison spending grew 25 times faster than state spending on higher education over that period, according to the NAACP study.
California spends about $50,000 to house one inmate for one year. The state has the nation's highest recidivism rate, with about 70 percent of those released committing another crime.
"Thirty years ago, 10 percent of the state's general fund was devoted to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons," said Mitch Kapor, a San Francisco venture capitalist working with the Level Playing Field Institute, a program that provides educational help to minority students in poor schools who show promise in science and math.
The state this year spent $9.2 billion on prisons and $11.6 billion on universities and community colleges. Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed cutting higher education to $9.8 billion while holding prison spending steady.
Soaring prison costs have piqued interest among conservatives as well as the NAACP, particularly initiatives such as state Attorney General Kamala Harris' "smart on crime" program, which reserves prison for violent offenders while steering lesser offenders to vocational education and drug counseling.
Bipartisan thinking
On Thursday, Harris was in the city of Tulare to announce a multiagency task force to investigate and arrest violent gang members.
"Conservatives should not give a blank check to the prison system," said Pat Nolan, a former Republican leader in the California Assembly, who now works with a Bible-based criminal justice reform group, Prison Fellowship Ministries. "Are we getting more public safety for each new dollar we spend?"
Nolan said there should be better means of dealing with nonviolent felons than "sending them to a very expensive prison where they are put in with violent people, because the skills they learn to survive inside a violent prison make them more dangerous when they get out."
Mike Jiminez, president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, described California prisons as "human warehouses" where "there's nothing productive going on. On our best days, we manage to keep everybody safe, but we're not able to rehabilitate or correct behavior by any means. The system's just too massive."
Jiminez questioned whether it is cost-effective "to lock somebody up for $50,000 a year who stole $500 worth of tools out of my truck on the street. That seems to be insane to me."
He said it would be better to determine the risk to public safety a felon poses and whether there are underlying problems such as drug addiction, mental illness or unemployability that could be addressed differently.
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/08/MNVK1IS92I.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, April 8, 2011
(04-08) 04:00 PDT Washington - -- With cash-strapped California hosting the nation's largest prison population, an unusual left-right coalition said Thursday it wants to slash state spending on prisons rather than cut school budgets.
At a news conference in Washington, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous joined anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, California correctional officers union chief Mike Jiminez, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and others to argue that prison spending costs taxpayers a fortune, damages the state's economic future and does little to improve public safety.
The U.S. prison population stands at 2.3 million, with African Americans making up about a quarter of that. America's incarceration rates are higher than South Africa's were at the peak of apartheid, according to an NAACP study.
170,000 prisoners
As part of the campaign, the NAACP is putting up billboards in Los Angeles and Houston, which say: "Welcome to America, home to 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners."
California's prison population, now at 170,000, grew 500 percent from 1982 to 2000. State prison spending grew 25 times faster than state spending on higher education over that period, according to the NAACP study.
California spends about $50,000 to house one inmate for one year. The state has the nation's highest recidivism rate, with about 70 percent of those released committing another crime.
"Thirty years ago, 10 percent of the state's general fund was devoted to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons," said Mitch Kapor, a San Francisco venture capitalist working with the Level Playing Field Institute, a program that provides educational help to minority students in poor schools who show promise in science and math.
The state this year spent $9.2 billion on prisons and $11.6 billion on universities and community colleges. Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed cutting higher education to $9.8 billion while holding prison spending steady.
Soaring prison costs have piqued interest among conservatives as well as the NAACP, particularly initiatives such as state Attorney General Kamala Harris' "smart on crime" program, which reserves prison for violent offenders while steering lesser offenders to vocational education and drug counseling.
Bipartisan thinking
On Thursday, Harris was in the city of Tulare to announce a multiagency task force to investigate and arrest violent gang members.
"Conservatives should not give a blank check to the prison system," said Pat Nolan, a former Republican leader in the California Assembly, who now works with a Bible-based criminal justice reform group, Prison Fellowship Ministries. "Are we getting more public safety for each new dollar we spend?"
Nolan said there should be better means of dealing with nonviolent felons than "sending them to a very expensive prison where they are put in with violent people, because the skills they learn to survive inside a violent prison make them more dangerous when they get out."
Mike Jiminez, president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, described California prisons as "human warehouses" where "there's nothing productive going on. On our best days, we manage to keep everybody safe, but we're not able to rehabilitate or correct behavior by any means. The system's just too massive."
Jiminez questioned whether it is cost-effective "to lock somebody up for $50,000 a year who stole $500 worth of tools out of my truck on the street. That seems to be insane to me."
He said it would be better to determine the risk to public safety a felon poses and whether there are underlying problems such as drug addiction, mental illness or unemployability that could be addressed differently.
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/08/MNVK1IS92I.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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