Stanford Criminologist Joan Petersilia spoke recently to San Quentin prisoners concerning California’s current prison healthcare and overcrowding crisis and the federal court’s intervention into California’s prison operations. The court’s aim is to force development of a plan to end the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) violation of prisoners’ right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.
Petersilia is currently Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School. In her lecture she explored the complexities of California’s parole policy. She is the author of a report, “Understanding California Corrections,” that found that more than 70,000 parolees are returned to CDCR annually with approximately 17,000 “pure technical” violations. (Not arrested for a new crime but have violated a term or condition of parole.)
Petersilia’s report explained, this “… high return-to-prison rate for parole violators is creating a destructive situation by constantly cycling offenders in and out of prison…this churning or catch-and-release disrupts the inmate’s ability to participate in community-based rehabilitative programs, encourages the spread of prison-gang culture in communities and wastes parole processing resources.”
Petersilia focused on a plan authorized by Assembly Bill 900 that calls for building numerous re-entry facilities around the state to solve some of CDCR’s overcrowding problems.
However, this plan is contrary to the federal court’s stated finding that AB900 is “… essentially is a prison expansion measure which increases the number of prison cells without addressing the fundamental structural issues that have caused the crisis and that have created unconstitutional conditions within the prisons.”
The plan in AB900 runs counter to the court’s earlier decision that “…we are convinced that neither prison expansion, nor re-entry or medical facilities construction, nor any other construction effort offers a meaningful and timely remedy for the constitutional deficiencies in the delivery of prison medical and mental health care caused by crowding.”
During a question period some inmates asked Petersilia to address the court’s order that capped the prison population at 109,764 or 137.5% of designed capacity of 79,828. Petersilia said that the state has the capacity to expand and maintain a prison population of approximately 160,000 inmates, in spite of the court’s position.
As for causes of the growth in number of inmates, Petersilia said, “The expansive growth of the prison population in California is due, in part, to the state’s adoption of determinate sentencing in the 1970s…and the countless increases in criminal sentences enacted by the legislature or in initiative measures in succeeding years. In addition, California’s prison population has increased because of its post-sentencing practices. The state has been widely criticized for not doing a better job of preparing inmates to return to society.”
