A top prison expert on the California ‘disaster’ and how to save it | State and Region

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

Q: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation – in its recent update of a federal court order to reduce its prison population – reported that its facilities were filled to 112% of capacity. Even that’s a big improvement over the drastic overcrowding that prompted the order. Can you help put into context how California got into this situation?

A: It used to be the model of prisons in the country. Even when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California, he reduced the prison population from about 26,000 to 18,000. They used to have a big treatment orientation, they hired social workers, and basically it was at the forefront of a rehabilitating incarceration model.

And then, in the ’60s and ’70s, there was an onslaught on rehabilitation for a whole bunch of reasons. But the most important reason is if you have a rehabilitation model then you give judges and parole boards a lot of discretion. In 1976, California…went toward a final conviction and basically abandoned rehabilitation as part of their mission. And you have to understand that the liberals were okay with that because they didn’t like probation. They felt that the parole board was holding people who were politically active and not letting them out.

California became punitive with its policies. The things that have been done, not just in California but in general, have all been justified with the idea that we want inmates to suffer. The more they suffer, the less likely they are to re-offend, which is actually not true. But that was the logic. And the result, I think, was a disaster. If you abolish rehabilitation, you take conscience out of the system.

In California this year we had what was called the “Norway Prison Act”, which would have created a pilot program in prisons, with campuses similar to prisons in Norway – select prisoners could cook their own meals and live in common rooms while receiving vocational training. Newsom vetoed it, along with two other prison-related measures. His veto message wasn’t that these wouldn’t work. His veto message was that we cannot afford to spend the money now. How do you react to this claim?

For this reason it was foolish to veto this legislation: the Norwegian model works. Now, would it work here in the United States where there are racial issues and other conflicts in prison? We have a different population here, we have racial conflicts, we have different problems. But apart from that, why not do an experiment?

That is, if you did a Norway unit in our prison, you could have tested it for effectiveness. Can I definitely say it would have worked here? no I think that would have done it? Yes, because the principles make sense.

We have had court cases showing that inmates’ medical care is inadequate and prison conditions are poor. The recidivism rate is high and there are many (probation) revocations. It seems to me that the argument that we shouldn’t spend money is a pretty weak justification. We spend money on fines, build prisons and lock people up for long periods of time. So why can’t we spend money on things that are humane and effective?

The other problem with this is if you don’t invest in people and they come out and commit crimes, do people understand the cost of it? There was a study that looked at the cost if someone is a juvenile and becomes a serious offender for a few years, that’s about $1.3 million.

Not wanting to spend money when spending money is the only way to invest in people and make them less criminal – it saves money later. How much is that worth to you?

What we mean by liberal is a concern for social justice, not a focus on punishment. An attempt to see that crime is rooted in various factors, be it poverty or mental health issues, rather than saying that crime is simply a choice that we must tackle toughly.

“Not stupid” meant that everything we do in the system should be evidence-based, based on the best science, so the interventions we use should be based on what criminology has shown to understand people’s behavior to change.

The question is, when liberals make suggestions about what to do, are they doing it on the basis of ideologies? Are they doing it based on science? Are you looking at the research? Recommending programs that aren’t rooted in solid science can end up being stupid.

And maybe that was a bad thing. But if you implement bail reform that doesn’t have the support of the staff, it will end up firing people who will inevitably commit serious crimes. This is what can delegitimize liberal approaches. Now bail reform is under attack across the country.

So that would be an example of that, did they do an empirical study of what the impact of bail would be? In other words, you can do legal reform scientifically or politically.

Is that what you meant when you wrote: “The failure of previous reforms aimed at decarceration is a sobering reminder that good intentions do not easily yield good results.”

Yes, one would likely be when we decided to largely empty and close most of the psychiatric institutions, the hospitals for the mentally ill.

We turned a lot of people out and didn’t have services for them. And so it was good that people weren’t in mental hospitals, right? But we didn’t create a system to take care of these people in the community, so a lot of these people ended up on the streets, homeless, in the prison system, in the criminal justice system. And we still haven’t fully processed that.

It is one of the sources of homelessness. It’s not the only one, but that would be the best example of how we basically de-institutionalized a whole bunch of people and then didn’t have programs to deal with it.

The point is, even today, I mean, we have more (post-prison) re-entry programs, but a lot of the people that we get out of prison have mental health issues, they don’t have medicine, they don’t have a place to live, they don’t have any Job. And there’s no point in doing that.

It seems there is an attitude in California that nothing works and nothing will work to reduce the prison population and improve rehabilitation outcomes. You’ve written about this mood in corrections you describe as a period of pessimism. Is there a sense of helplessness when dealing with this issue?

Corrections are like trying to fight cancer. You have to tick it off, look for the small benefits. But over 20 years it can make a difference.

It’s almost as if no one is doing anything about it, whose responsibility it is to change what is happening. If no one takes responsibility, nothing will change. There almost needs to be a social movement, a demand that we make prisons better. Any other business run like prisons would be out of business. You would be bankrupt.

We do not hold prison guards responsible for the recidivism rates of people in their prisons. Think about it, okay: If you look at people who have been released from prison, which includes people who have been incarcerated for the first time as well as people who have been incarcerated for the second, third, fourth time, you get 50 to 60 percent recidivism rates .

When you’re spending that much money and you have a 60 percent failure rate, what’s it costing us? Not just the money, but injured and dying people or damage to property? I mean, that level of failure shouldn’t be acceptable. Think of a hospital where 60 percent of the people die or get worse.

It’s disappointing that something as small as a Norway experiment can’t even be funded. It will only lead to too much misery within the institutions and a lot of high recidivism rates.

It’s like, you are California! You should want a return to greatness. You should be the best in the world.