Prison Reform in California Locked Up

[Alyssa]

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that California Senate Republicans have blocked a plan to build new health-care facilities in the state's prisons and are going to block a proposed settlement of a prison overcrowding lawsuit. These are, in every possible way, pretty terrible ideas. The prison system is in receivership, and the receiver says he'll raid the state coffers to pay for prison hospitals, if he has to. Without the settlement, the lawsuit will go to court, where the judges have the option of freeing large numbers of prisoners, which the Republican Senators have said they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Look, I like a Howe & Hummelesque mass-prisoner-release-on-a-technicality story as much as anyone, but letting one happen in this case seems to serve not puckishness but political grandstanding. And it's particularly disturbing given that the $7 billion the court receiver wants for prison hospitals would be aimed at providing beds for prisoners with long-term medical problems and mental illnesses.

While the Bush administration has always insisted that there are clear distinctions between prisoners being held in Gitmo and those in the general prison population, I wonder how the existence of Gitmo and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan affects American prison administration. Even before the administration started playing by a very different set of rules for war on terror prisoners, jail in the United States sounded like a terrifying place to be in any capacity. But I wonder if Gitmo's existence and use have made it easier for prison administrators to draw a harder line on prisoner treatment--or if our treatment of prisoners of war has made domestic incarceration look good by comparison, and blunted prison reform as an issue.

Comments

And forgive us our trespasses, AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US.

Love your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you.

"We believe these are God's words, and we demand that you display them in the town square, so we can more publicly ignore them."

Posted by ferd | May 30, 2008 9:42 AM

I'm not sure the culture of abuse is moving in only one direction, from military to domestic incarceration; it's more like a feedback loop. The militarization of police and prisons has been building for decades now. Charles Graner, one of the ringleaders in the Abu Ghraib scandal, had worked as a guard in the Pennsylvania prison system and was involved in a similar scandal at SCI Greene in the late '90s; he was apparently the one the other reservists were looking to for a sense of how prison guards are supposed to act.

Posted by Hogan | May 30, 2008 9:55 AM

Definitely Hogan. According to Joseph Darby, Charles Graner said, “The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss himself.’”

Posted by Matt Weiner | May 30, 2008 10:26 AM

"But I wonder . . . if our treatment of prisoners of war has made domestic incarceration look good by comparison, and blunted prison reform as an issue."

I practice criminal defense in the Deep South. From where I sit, I can't say there's a prison reform movement to be blunted. In Alabama, for example, the Department of Corrections has tried for years to deal with massive overcrowding, but the Legislature, Governor, Attorney General, and Board of Pardons and Parole have, in various ways, fought this at nearly every turn. Efforts at prison reform are the exception, rather than the rule. If anything, our national attitude toward prisons and prisoners may have enabled our policies in Gitmo and elsewhere. There could be a feedback loop at play, but I'm reserving judgment on whether Gitmo is a prime mover in prison policy.

Posted by JB | May 30, 2008 10:41 AM

Alyssa,

I worked in cases against the Calfornia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) regarding health care for prisoners and I assure you that poor treatment of prisoners in California began long before Abu Ghraib.

Posted by adlsad | May 30, 2008 10:45 AM

Just pretty terrifying?

I thought of this the other night while attending the Yankees-Orioles game in Camden Yards. Some blowhard from the Bronx was picking fights, and eventually threw some punches and was ejected.

What a way to spend the night - get drunk to watch your favorite team play...

...and wind up spending the night in central booking...

in Baltimore.

I'm not too sure the boys from the corner of Mosher and Stricker are fans of Jeter.

Posted by GtheK | May 30, 2008 11:30 AM

I second JB's comments. However, I do think that increased attention to detention conditions raised by GTMO and Abu Ghraib is having an effect, though very slight, on the ability to raise prison reform issues. I mean, when people say "they are held in isolation 24 hours a day!" about people at GTMO, you talk about that for a while and then explain to people that they do that here, too.

Posted by m. leblanc | May 30, 2008 11:46 AM

Well this was pretty much Hannah Arendt's argument, yes? That violence perpetrated by European states on the people of color in their colonies began to bleed over into their domestic policies. By defining certain human beings as outsiders, and becoming accustomed to brutalizing them, it became more acceptable to brutalize people domestically who had been defined as "others."

According to this story, then, the inhumane treatment of "others" abroad--in this case people who are kinda middle-eastern-looking--comes to justify the similarly deplorable treatment of "others" at home.

But why should this have started only with the Bush Administration's post-9/11 crimes? We have been defining people as outsiders (mostly on the basis of race) and brutalizing them in this country for centuries.

Posted by rufustfyrfly | May 30, 2008 12:12 PM

I worked for a bit with the former receiver's office and visited a few of the prison healthcare facilities. The administrators of those facilities were desperate for funding to take care of their populations. Three strikes laws are crippling the whole system.

If anyone is guilty of abusing the prisoners, its a society that wants to lock them up forever and then forget about them.

Posted by flory | May 30, 2008 12:54 PM

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/san_diego_zoo_prison_merge

'nough said.

Posted by Jack | May 30, 2008 3:54 PM

flory said:

The administrators of those facilities were desperate for funding to take care of their populations. Three strikes laws are crippling the whole system.

I was a resident when three strikes went into effect, and recall the concern that it was going to pack the prisons with shoplifters doing hard time.

A quick look at Wikipedia shows this: '...for the ten years prior to the enactment of the “3 strikes law,” the California prison population expanded by 400% and for the ten years after there was an overall increase of only 25.5%, a massive decrease in prison population expansion.' (from threestrikes.org's ten year report, 2004.)

If true, this would support the notion that the problem isn't three strikes, it's the skin-flints in Sacramento.

Posted by cmholm | May 30, 2008 4:07 PM

If California's three strikes hasn't filled the prison with petty non-violent criminals, isn't that only because the Romero decision allowed judges to waive three strikes in the interest of justice? If it had been implemented as written, it would have made prison population problems even worse. But the California Supreme Court found it unconstitutional as written. That's my fallible memory anyway.

Posted by treetop | May 30, 2008 5:29 PM

Alyssa: "Even before the administration started playing by a very different set of rules for war on terror prisoners, jail in the United States sounded like a terrifying place to be in any capacity. But I wonder if Gitmo's existence and use have made it easier for prison administrators to draw a harder line on prisoner treatment--or if our treatment of prisoners of war has made domestic incarceration look good by comparison, and blunted prison reform as an issue."

Having served nine years in the Federal prison system (and nine months in a California county jail waiting for sentencing in that case, since the Federal Detention Center was overcrowded), I can assure you that prison is not fun.

And definitely the Abu Ghraib behavior would be no surprise to those who deal with US correctional officer every day. There is no "bottom of the barrel" lower than a correctional officer, whether county, state, or Federal.

I would think, however, that the treatment of inmates in Iraq and Gitmo would assist the raising of the issue of prison treatment in the US. People need to keep pointing out, for example, that the forced feeding of hunger strike Gitmo inmates is done regularly in Federal prisons here. However, here the prisoner's sentencing judge is supposed to be informed and sign off on the process before it is used. I believe this is completely ignored, however, in the Federal system.

There is a "law enforcement complex" in this country just like a "military-industrial complex" - and it serves the same purposes: money and power.

The prison system in this country has been barbaric for decades. In the 1970's, some court cases led to courts assuming control of various state prison systems and influencing some reform. Then the pendulum swung the other way in the 1980's and 1990's.

The fact of the matter is that once you are adjudged a "criminal", you lose all rights to exist or be treated humanely. That is society's attitude and is reflected in the sort of scum who get hired as prison guards.

Most Federal corrections officers are either "wannabe cops" who couldn't pass the exams, or downsized ex-military who were too stupid to advance in the military. Being a prison guard is the only way these morons and psychopaths could earn $40-50,000 a year (and lots of overtime) as well as exercise their emotional problems on other people.

The Federal prison bureacracy is rife with bottom of the barrel bureaucrats, nepotism (half the staff in a given Federal prison are relatives or spouses of the other half of the staff), venal corruption (prison staff routinely loot the prison of supplies for their own benefit), and maliciousness.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 30, 2008 5:58 PM