Features

5,000 fewer inmates after first year of Proposition 36 

SACRAMENTO – California’s prison population will drop by more than 5,000 inmates in the first year after voters opted to send drug offenders to treatment instead of prison, according to new projections. 

The nation’s largest prison population — 160,655 inmates at the end of 2000 — will keep shrinking until 2004. Then, tough-on-crime laws will grow the population again, although much more slowly than prison officials had projected before now. 

By 2006, the population is projected to be nearly 18,000 inmates less than the California Department of Corrections had predicted just six months ago, before voters approved Proposition 36 in November. 

Despite the drop, prison officials say they need to keep building maximum-security prisons to house hard-core offenders. And officials in California’s 58 counties could see their budgets stretched considerably as they take on the burden of treating and supervising drug offenders. 

The proposition, which takes effect July 1, requires that those convicted of using or possessing drugs for the first or second time be sent to community treatment programs instead of prison or jail. 

After the first year, the department predicts its population will be 9,216 lower than it had estimated in October. Of that, the voter initiative is projected to be responsible for 5,388 fewer inmates. 

The decrease due to Proposition 21 is expected to continue in successive years, but Corrections spokesman Russ Heimerich warned that the department is entering uncharted waters. 

“Especially with Proposition 36, we just don’t know what kind of effect that’s going to have,” Heimerich said. 

The projections depend in large part on guessing how many drug offenders will qualify, and whether California’s 58 county prosecutors will refuse to negotiate plea bargains with drug dealers, knowing that a drug use or possession conviction will bring no prison time. 

“To me it sounds like the estimates might be a little aggressive,” said K. Jack Riley, director of Rand Corp.’s community justice department. “I think we’ll see uneven implementation of it across the state.” 

Riley hopes to provide guidance for other states looking to California for direction on how the drug treatment proposition works. 

Riley directed a preliminary Proposition 36 study last year, and has applied for a state grant to study its impact in the state’s nine largest metropolitan counties, with preliminary results expected by early fall. 

Steve Green, assistant secretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, predicted the proposition will eventually result in longer terms for hard-core drug offenders. 

“In the long run, we think our population will go up as persons who escape prison the first time around come into the system as they commit more serious crimes,” Green said. 

Fewer drug offenders also won’t mean a dramatic cut in prison costs, Green said, because most serious drug offenders are housed in minimum security conservation camps and community correctional facilities. 

“We continue to have a serious shortage of maximum-security beds in state prisons,” Green said. “We don’t see that abating anytime soon.” 

The prison population dropped last year for the first time in 22 years. Prison officials credited a lower crime rate and a drop in parole violations. 

According to the report, the number of inmates dropped 1,345 in the last half of the year, for a net decline for 2000 of 32 inmates. That compares to an increase of 1,124 in 1999 and 4,287 in 1998. 

The decline compares to an average 14.5 percent population growth during the 1980s and average 6.3 percent increases during the 1990s. 

An economic downturn also could drive up crime rates again, as is already beginning to happen in the latest urban crime reports, Green warned. 

He said fewer parolees may be returning to prison because of new programs aimed at helping ex-convicts get jobs, and because of increased supervision of ex-convicts with two felonies — those who face life in prison for a third offense under the state’s three-strikes law. 

That law, along with other sentence increases, will eventually overcome the drop in prison population due to Proposition 36, the department report said. 

In addition, the Proposition 21 juvenile justice measure — approved by voters in March 2000 — may increase the population of adult prisons while it reduces the population of juvenile facilities. 

The initiative expands the definition of serious or violent offenses that qualify under the three-strikes law and boosts penalties for street-gang activities. However, the proposition is being challenged in court and its future is uncertain.