California: Opening the prison gates

“It’s the legal equivalent of a two-by-four to the head,” said the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. A federal court last week ordered California to reduce “its overcrowded, dangerous, unhealthy prisons” by 40,000 inmates—fully a quarter of the population now behind bars. The state, which is expected to appeal the order, has 45 days to cobble together a plan to ease the absurd overcrowding: A system built for 85,000 inmates now crams in 150,000. Options include releasing some prisoners a few months early, relaxing parole policies, and shifting some prisoners to city and county jails. “There’s enormous risk involved,” said Eli Lehrer in National Review Online. In coming weeks, you’ll hear talk of releasing only “nonviolent” offenders, but 60 percent of career thieves, burglars, and drug dealers have assaults or other violent crimes on their rap sheets. The bottom line: Tens of thousands of bad guys are headed back to the street, “where they will commit more crimes.”

The important thing, though, is that the bad guys aren’t inconvenienced, said Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle. So say the judges who ordered this release, contending that California prisons are “at 190 percent capacity.” But that’s because they define 100 percent capacity as one prisoner per cell. Is it really cruel and inhumane to put two prisoners in a bunk bed in one cell? That’s a vast oversimplification, said The San Diego Union-Tribune. The state brought this crisis on itself by ignoring “years of warnings” about its 33 prisons, where some inmates sleep in triple bunk beds and are often warehoused in gyms, hallways, and other spaces never meant for human habitation. Last week, inmates at Chino prison erupted into a violent, 11-hour race riot that left 200 inmates injured—and overcrowding was undoubtedly a factor.

This is what comes of giving voters what they want without requiring them to pay for it, said Dan Walters in the Fresno, Calif., Bee. When people complained about crime, the legislature passed tough sentencing laws, including the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” law, which mandates prison terms for a string of minor offenses. No one, of course, thought to “spend what it would take to legally house, clothe, feed, medicate, and educate what became a flood of new inmates.” That same disconnect between short-term political gain and reality has also left the state with “a calamitous water-supply shortage,” broken schools, and congested, pothole-filled highways. Now the bill for California’s folly is coming due.

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