Prison Reform Is in Danger
Governor must not cave in to guards union.
By Joe Domanick, Commentary
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared that "the purpose
of corrections is to correct" and that he intended to
reform California's hard-nosed prison and parole systems to
place emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment, it
was a double-take moment that could have snapped your neck.
After all, he is a Republican, and being tough on crime has
been a signature issue for the GOP ever since presidential
candidate Barry Goldwater made law and order a top campaign
issue in 1964.
But in his first months in office, Schwarzenegger has moved
away from the GOP hard line, emerging as a champion of
radical prison and parole reform in a tightly policed,
tough-on-crime state with 32 state prisons, 140,000 men and
women on probation or parole and more than 160,000 under
lock and key.
And all the stars were aligned for his success: a bizarre
recall election signaling voters' disgust with the status
quo; a $7-billion-a-year corrections system that was
hemorrhaging money; and a judge threatening to place the
entire system under federal monitoring. It was a scenario
under which real reform, so highly implausible just two
years ago, might actually happen.
But will it? Two weeks ago, in an unpromising omen, the
state Department of Corrections announced it was abandoning
a program that diverted parolees who had committed minor
parole violations to halfway houses or home detention. This
was a serious matter. Before the program, as many as 70,000
California parolees were being sent back to prison
annually, while just 21% were completing parole. The move
to abandon the program probably violated a Department of
Corrections court settlement promising to decrease the
state's unconscionably overcrowded prison population.
Schwarzenegger's aides said the program's curtailment was
not a sign of a policy shift. It's just that the program
wasn't working. Schwarzenegger says he still supports
reform.
But the winds of change are blowing backward for the
governor these days. Schwarzenegger's designation of
nurses, firefighters, teachers and police officers' widows
as "special interests" to be fought looks ridiculous while
he's hosting dinners and smiling as the GOP
special-interest fat cats pay $89,000 a plate to have their
pictures taken with him. As a result, he's now beating a
rapid retreat on his legislative attacks on the state's
public service unions.
That's bad as far as his prison reform agenda is concerned
because for decades the mighty, 32,000-member California
Correctional Peace Officers Assn. (the state prison guards
union) has been the biggest impediment to reform of a
corrections system so scandal-plagued that a report
commissioned by the new governor described it as
"dysfunctional â€" with little accountability,
no uniformity or transparency, too much political
interference, too much union control and too little
management courage."
But the prison guards union loses if Schwarzenegger's
reform agenda of lowering the prison population and
decreasing costs takes hold. Contractually, there is one
guard for every six new prisoners. The more prisoners, the
more guards and money and power for the union. It's as
simple as that. Union leaders are determined to throw a
monkey wrench into the governor's grand scheme. They've
unleashed their creature, "Crime Victims United" (heavily
subsidized by the union) to oppose reform, and the
corrections department's decision to rescind the parole
plan was their first success.
For more than 20 years, the prison guards have kept
Democratic and Republican governors and state legislators
â€" be they Bay Area liberals or rural
archconservatives â€" obsequiously grateful for
their big campaign contributions and petrified, at the same
time, that the union would oppose them. If Schwarzenegger
is to make fundamental change, he will have to spend a lot
of political capital fighting the union. So far he's talked
a good game, but actions speak louder than platitudes. He
had no problem dampening his reform urges in 2004, for
example, when he succumbed to pressure from the criminal
justice and political establishment and opposed softening
California's draconian three-strikes law â€" a
law that was sending thousands of people to prison for 25
years to life for small-time drug possession and petty
theft. Many of these third-strikers were ripe for rehab,
but Schwarzenegger conveniently ignored that fact and
starred in fear-mongering television ads that crushed the
initiative.
Despite that, let's remember what's at stake here: a
once-in-a-generation opportunity for Californians to derail
a gut-reaction, political-pandering, failed solution to
crime and drug addiction and to replace it with smarter,
more effective, more humane policies based on proven
social-science data. Of all the initiatives the governor's
instituted, this is the one that needs to be supported.
Joe Domanick is a senior fellow at USC Annenberg's
Institute for Justice and Journalism.
See the article on Los Angeles Times website