I SPENT NEARLY three decades working in California's prison system, beginning in 1978 when I arrived as a 24-year-old corrections officer at San Quentin.
During that time, I watched the inmate population grow from about 26,000 to more than 170,000 in 2006. Prison capacity tripled during this same time period, yet our prisons are more overcrowded than ever. The budget of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will exceed $8 billion in 2007, and yet we will still lack the funds to meet even the health and mental health needs of the offenders we house, much less to fund the programs that offenders need to prepare them to be successful in society.
I was personally thrilled two years ago when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed adding the word "rehabilitation" to the name of the California Department of Corrections. For me, this change reflected an important transition from the old punishment model that we'd lived with for so many years.
The new "California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation" was supposed to research and implement new practices and programs that would help prisoners succeed when they were released and thereby help bring down California's extraordinarily high recidivism rates.
July 1, 2005, when the new agency was baptized, was indeed a bright day, filled with hope for the beginning of an improved criminal justice policy for California.
But despite high hopes at the inception, the reality is that not much has changed. Because of short-term political concerns on the part of state legislators, pandering campaign tactics that make politicians scared to be seen as soft on crime, and the extraordinary power of the correctional officers union, it's been impossible to truly turn around the system. Chronic underfunding and prison overpopulation continue, and the recidivism rate remains the highest in the country.
Earlier this year, I left my job as acting head of the corrections department in part because of frustration over the inability to push through the kinds of changes I thought were necessary.
How has this situation come about? For the last three decades, California criminal justice policy has developed haphazardly, through laws passed by politicians whose chief goal was to appear to be tougher on crime than their opponents. Any attempt to have a serious discussion about California criminal justice policy (or the lack thereof) has been stymied by campaign accusations designed to scare voters and weaken reform-minded candidates.
