California's Slide Into the Fiscal Ocean

Warren Zevon was a talented singer / songwriter who didn’t flinch from the macabre or even the apocalypse.

Two years ago, I posted about “Prison Grove,” a song on the last album he released before dying of cancer.

Tonight, I’m thinking of “Desperadoes Under The Eaves,” from thirty years before that.

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will . . .

Zevon’s song was nominally talking about the consequences of not paying a bar bill, as his thirst extended to “all the salty margaritas in Los Angeles.”

Figuratively, however, I’m struck by how Zevon’s mid-70s song was written at a time when the affluent but overextended California of the postwar years was on the verge of buckling.

By the decade of the aughts, the fiscal slide into the ocean of insolvency was nearly complete.

The factors were many and various. Proposition 13 in 1978, which limited property taxes. The end of the Cold War, and the subsequent downsizing of aerospace jobs, such as the one Michael Douglas’s character once had in the film "Falling Down."

And then there was the fiscal drain of a gargantuan state corrections system. A system that expanded so grotesquely that federal courts had to take over control of the system.

The feds did not seek out this responsibility; it came about because California’s prison healthcare was so deficient that it killed people through medication errors and drove others crazy amid the constant claustrophobia of triple bunking.

Zevon is gone. But the bizarre story of the once-golden state’s prisons continues to unfold, as this Los Angeles Times article describes.

The Toilet Ratio

Das Boot is an acclaimed German film depicting the grim realities of service on German submarines in the Second World War. The death toll was astonishingly high; about 30,000 of the 40,000 men who served on U-boats never returned.

The claustrophobic conditions also took a terrible psychological toll on the sailors, even before hostilities with other vessels begin.

Onboard the U- boat, the quarters were cramped, foul smells of all sorts filled the air, and there was only one toilet for all fifty or so men.

Curiously, the experience of having to share a single toilet with fifty other men also occurred in an entirely different context: California’s prisons.

Last year, Brown v. Plata, a constitutional challenge to overcrowding in those prisons, reached the U.S. Supreme Court prisons. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that, in some prisons in the California system, as many as 54 inmates shared the same toilet.

The Sense of a Blog's Ending

I’ve had a good run with this blog. I launched it in December 2008, choosing the domain name on Blogger of Righteous Harvest. The name was meant to signify biblical roots and restorative justice aspirations.

I later inserted the title Piercing the Panopticon. This was intended to take on the issue of America’s excessive reliance on prison as a means of resolving social conflict.

Over the last 3-plus years, I’ve tried to tackle topics of large import. In several posts, I took up California’s prison overcrowding crisis. In others, I delved into Michel Foucault’s analysis of the power dynamics underlying the ascendancy of the modern prison.

In 2009, I eagerly followed Sen. Jim Webb’s efforts to create a national criminal justice review commission. In due course, I commented on the failure of his proposal to go anywhere in Congress.

The reasons for this failure became clearer in 2011, when Daedalus and Wilson Quarterly published themed issues on the phenomenon of mass incarceration.

Since joining the board of directors of Prison Congregations of America in 2010, I’ve increasingly attempted to articulate the value of prison ministry — for people on both sides of the walls. Piercing the Panopticon began to take on a new meaning for me: fostering hope in the light of Christ among those in the figurative darkness of prison.

It’s time for me to reboot my blog to focus more clearly on prison ministry. During Lent, I intend to post a few more times here on Righteous Harvest, seeking to sum up the themes of the last three years. I’ll do so, however, with the sense of an ending.

Horror in Honduras

It shouldn’t take a horrific fire in a foreign prison to make the problem of packed prisons palpable.

But USA Today’s headline is correct, as far as it goes. The terrible conflagration in Honduras that claimed as many as 356 lives should put a spotlight on prison overcrowding.

How strong of a spotlight, though, and for how long?

If the spotlight is strong enough, it will not focus only on Latin America. For the U.S. has struggled for years with its own forms of prison overcrowding.

California has been the most conspicuous case. Many inmates died there due to lack of access to proper healthcare caused by severe overcrowding.

Lipstick on a Prison Pig

California’s long-standing corrections crisis continues to unfold. The state has been under federal court order to address severe overcrowding that so severely impacted access to healthcare that the court found it constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Though the case has been playing out for years, the situation remains tense. Recently, over 6,000 inmates went on a hunger strike to protest the conditions of incarceration. They claimed that many inmates are subjected to sensory deprivation in soundproofed cells without windows for 22 ½ hours a day.

The hunger strike went on for three weeks and involved 13 of the 33 prisons in the California system, according to press accounts.

Prison officials sought to rebut the allegations of inhumane treatment by holding an open house at the Pelican Bay State Prison. Legislatures and journalists were invited in to look around and, as it were, smell the (lack of) roses.

Prison spokesperson Oscar Hidalgo did not exactly give a ringing endorsement of the prison conditions. He called them “far from what we think is tortuous.”

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, of the General Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, had a different take. Borrowing a line from the 2008 presidential campaign, he said the Pelican Bay officials’ attempts to dress things up were like “lipstick on a pig.”

That phrase is certainly evocative. But the image of even the most bloated pig does not really capture the reality of the American prison system. Don't think pig; think Leviathan.

The Absurdity of Prison Crowding

I've forgotten exactly how Camus defined "the absurd."

But seeing pictures in Daedalus and Wilson Quarterly of triple-bunked inmates leaves one reaching for those words.

And then there's California, which has gone beyond absurd to downright ludicrous and unconstitionally cruel.

Terminal Litigation on California Prison Crowding

Does a federal court have the authority to order a large-scale release of prisoners in a state prison system? “Large-scale,” in the case from California now before the Supreme Court, means upwards of 46,000 inmates.

In the abstract, it seems like a breathtaking extension of federal power. But the question can be posed in a more specific way: Does a federal court have the authority to direct a state to grant early parole to relieve overcrowding so severe that it poses drastic risks to the health and safety of inmates and the state has systematically refused to build additional facilities?

The question was argued in the Supreme Court this week. The SCOTUS blog – a remarkable resource for the Internet age – has comprehensive coverage.

Litigation over California's overcrowded prisons has been playing out in the courts for years. It's been like Bleak House meets the Big House.

And as with any long-running series, sometimes the cast has to change. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have played the role of The Terminator in his movie career, but he won't be ending this messy saga. Jerry Brown won the election last month and will be replacing Arnold in the governor's chair, Whatever the outcome in the Supreme Court, Schwarzenegger v. Plata will be in need of a new caption.

What's in a Name?

Using preposterously high quantity to express the unquantifiable, the singer Bruce Cockburn once wrote a song referring to "the nine billion names of God."

Even when taking poetic license similar to Cockburn's, there are not nearly that many names for "correctional facility." But there are still quite a few, and the nuances are important.

Jail and prison, of course, are still standard terms. They are often wrongly used interchangably, when in fact the terms refer to qualitatively different types of facilities.

Jails are usually operated at the local (county) level and confine people who come from a number of different statuses. One type is convicted offenders whose sentences are for less than one year. But jail populations also often include many other people. Some are waiting for trial, while others are being confined for civil contempt or even non-payment of debts. Still others have been arrested but not yet charged.

Prison, in America, has historically been a place where convicted offenders serving sentences of a year or more are sent. Each state has at least one, and the federal government operates it own system in addition to the state systems.

Traditionally, there was more programming (substance abuse treatment, sex offender treatment, and so on) in prison than in jail. This was because the shorter length of stay in jail did not lend itself as well to successful programming. Today, however, with budgets cuts eroding prison programming, the difference that formerly existed between jail and prison regarding the extent of programming is eroding as well.

In an earlier era of corrections, the operative words were not jail or prison, but penitentiary or reformatory. These names, with their religious origins, pointed to the rehabilitative goal that once animated American corrections. Each person, the thought was, should use the incarceration time to reflect on his or her errors and work to expiate and reform them, in order to become a socially responsible self once again.

In the last few decades, the rehabilitative idea has been in decline and punishment as the primary purpose of incarceration has been ascendant. The term "correctional facility" is therefore the signature one of our time, expressing a sort of bureaucratic indifference to the outcome of what occurs within the walls.

One example of this was related to me by my colleague Gloria, with whom I serve on the board of Prison Congregations of America. Gloria tells the story of how, while serving a sentence at the South Dakota State Penitentiary, she and the other inmates woke up one morning to find that the new governor had changed the name. It was no longer a penitentiary; it was a "correctional facility."

But the generic term "correctional facility," and the commonly used "jail" and "prison," cannot completely displace the many other terms that are in use, either historically or in specific communities.

In the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about being confined to "gaol" - an old word that is etymologically related to jail.

The word "prison" has a host of synonyms, such as "the big house."

The children's novelist Lemony Snicket used the word "brig" in one of his novels and defined it as "an official nautical term for jail."

Star Trek fans know that even in the 23rd century, the Starship Enterprise had a brig for detention purposes. Give Trek creator Gene Rodenberry credit there for a realistic appraisal of the human condition. As much as I have decried excessive incarceration in this blog, I do not suggest that human society can or should try to go without it.

California's Calamitous Corrections Crisis Continued

The Sacramento Bee’s account described the U.S. Supreme Court’s order as “terse,” and having read the Court’s order I can understand why.

“The application for stay presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court is denied. In denying the stay, the Court takes note of the fact that the three-judge district court has indicated that its final order will not be implemented until this Court has had the opportunity to review the district court's decree.” Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, No. 09A234, 9/11/09.

Behind this banal order, an ugly human tragedy has been unfolding for years. California was once the Golden State, to which − paraphrasing Paul Simon on Joe DiMaggio − the restless eyes of the nation turned, In recent years, however, it has become a state that has inmates triple-bunked in gymnasiums, hallways and other unlikely places, with their medical records in chaos, resulting in a sad succession of suicides and preventable illnesses over the past decade − all fully documented in evidence admitted in federal court.

When inmate groups proved their case in a grueling legal ground game, it became clear that things had to change. Finally, on August 4, a special 3-judge district court imposed a population cap. California’s 33 prisons hold more than more than 148,000 inmates today, in a system designed for 80,000. The cap is intended to bring the population to 110,000 within two years, or 137.5 percent of design capacity.

Even with this constitutionally mandated cap being imposed by the courts, the California General Assembly failed yet again to pass a bill to address the endemic crowding problems in any realistic way. A proposal to allow lower-risk, seriously ill or elderly prisoners to serve the last 12 months of their sentences under house arrest with electronic monitoring was defeated, as were many others. The General Assembly adjourned having done little more than rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, with a bill to cut the prison population by 7,500 inmates over two years – a fraction of the 38,000 needed to pass constitutional muster.

In its two-sentence order on September 11, the Supreme Court turned down the state’s attempt to further delay fixing the problems. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has until September 18 to submit a prison population reduction plan to the court that imposed the cap. With or without the governor’s help, the court will act, with the U.S. Supreme Court likely to decide the ultimate constitutionality of the federal intervention into California’s prison system.

As the justices are researching their decision, one wonders whether any of their clerks will have Kate Wolf’s song “Here in California” loaded on an I-pod:



“There's an old familiar story
An old familiar rhyme
To everything there is a season
To every purpose there's a time
A time to love and come together
A time when love longs for air
A time for questions we can't answer
Though we ask them just the same
Here in California fruit hangs heavy on the vines
There's no gold I thought I'd warn you
And the hills turn brown in the summertime.”

When it comes to California’s prisons, it’s passed the time for questions the state can’t answer. With its own state government having failed to do so, the Supreme Court is posed to provide an answer for them.

Walking the Line at Folsom, 2009

Today National Public Radio aired a disturbing report on the troubled California prison system, focusing on Folsom prison, where the singer Johnny Cash played a famous concert from a makeshift stage in the cafeteria in 1968.

Built to house 1800 inmates, Folsom now holds over 4400 in racially segregated cell blocks, and its once state-of-the art rehabilitation programs have been stripped to the bone. Violence − or the threat of violence − is omnipresent, with 15 to 20 inmate-on-inmate assaults per week.

Health care is deeply problematic. Facilities throughout the California system are under federal receivership because the state let inmate medical care deteriorate to the point that the federal courts found violations of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The abandonment of any attempt at programming for most inmates contributes to the strikingly high recidivism rate. Seventy five percent of the inmates return to prison within three years of their release.

In its admirably analytic way, NPR offered an informative survey of the policy decisions that have brought Folsom, and the entire California system, to this calamitous state.

• Increased parole sanctions
• Prison time for nonviolent drug offenders
• Elimination of indeterminate sentencing
• 1994’s “3 Strikes” law, which mandated life in prison for a third felony, even if it involved shoplifting

Not surprisingly, these policies led directly to a skyrocketing of the prison population. After holding steady at around 20,000 in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, it is now over 167,000.

Growing right along with the prison population − and even lobbying politically for that growth − has been the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The union has gone from 2,600 officers to 45,000, with salaries that are now so high that one in every 10 officers makes more than $100,000 a year. NPR quoted two recent directors of the state corrections department who asserted that the biggest problem they faced was the political influence of the union.

When will conservative critics who rail against what they claim is heavy-handed and inefficient government intervention in people’s lives turn their attention to the prison-industrial complex?

The truth about what’s going on behind the razor wire cannot be hidden much longer by the shibboleth of public safety rhetoric. It doesn't promote public safety to use prison as some sort of dog house, where people are kicked when they're down and come out of the cage even more dangerous than before. And in a recession like this one, with California’s state government having to issue improvised I-owe-Us trying to cover its debts, $100,000 prison guards and policies that put shoplifters in prison for life are due for a second look. Maybe even a change.

Dog Years

When I began reading an essay about the Obama family’s new dog, Bo, on the op/ed page, I wasn’t looking for material to use in a blog post. As much as I embrace E.O. Wilson’s notion of “consilience” — drawing on all spheres of human knowledge for holistic problem solving — I really didn’t expect Bo to contribute much toward the illumination of criminal justice issues.

The more I read of Wayne Pacelle’s essay, however, the more striking the parallel seemed between the warehousing of dogs in “puppy mills” and the warehousing of humans in jails and prisons. Pacelle is the president and CEO of the Humane Society. He paints a disturbing picture of the conditions inside the factory farms that spew out 4 million puppies every year, nearly 2 million of whom end up being euthanized in shelters for lack of a good home. Within the puppy mills, disease is rampant, as dogs typically get no exercise, no opportunity to leave their cages, and precious little, if any, human interaction.

It was jarring to read about these miserable conditions and disconcerting to realize I had been so oblivious to then. It's not as if our culture has no standards for the treatment of dogs. In December 2007, Michael Vick, the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback, was sentenced to 23 months in federal prison and 3 years of probation for his part in a brutal dog-fighting conspiracy. A professor at Valparaiso University School of Law (my law school alma mater), Rebecca Huss, was appointed guardian to the 48 pit bulls seized from Vick’s property by investigators. The legal system does not go to the trouble of bringing down star quarterbacks, and appointing guardians, for species whose members are completely disposable.

Is there an analogy between puppy mills and American prisons? In one way, the situation is the exact opposite. Dog farms churn out the pups hoping to sell them to people who want them, whereas prisons provide a place to confine unwanted people. But the health hazards of warehousing are inescapable, whether the species is canis lupus familiaris or homo sapiens.

For American inmates, the belly of the beast is most exposed in California, where the prison healthcare system has broken down under the strain of constant overcrowding. With inmates triple-bunked in gymnasiums, hallways and other unlikely places, and their medical records in chaos, many have died of preventable illnesses or committed suicide over the past decade. The federal courts have found this to be cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Eight Amendment. On February 9, a special three-judge panel announced its intention to cap the number of prisoners at slightly more than 100,000, a reduction of more than 50,000 from the current size of 156,000, which is twice the system’s designed capacity. (Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, 2009 WL 330960)

Michael Vick is scheduled to be released from federal prison in July. (Just in time for training camp?) How many unwanted dogs will still be languishing in puppy mill and shelters then, and how many unwanted humans in jails and prisons?