Features

Legislators call for halt to plans to build new prison

By Don Thompson Associated Press Writer
Monday April 22, 2002

SACRAMENTO – The chairman of the Senate Public Safety Committee and other lawmakers plan to call this week for the state to halt its plans to build a new maximum security prison at Delano. 

“California doesn’t need another prison, California can’t afford another prison, and Californians don’t want another prison,” Sen. Richard Polanco, D-Los Angeles, said in a statement. 

He and other lawmakers as well as prison opponents plan to call for a series of Department of Corrections budget cuts during a news conference Tuesday. That’s a day before Polanco chairs a budget subcommittee to consider about $1 million in new prison pre-construction money sought in Democratic Gov. Gray Davis’ proposed budget. 

Youth and Adult Correctional Agency spokesman Steve Green invited the lawmakers to tour crowded maximum-security prisons, and to interview a correctional officer at Susanville’s High Desert State Prison who in June “was nearly stamped to death by a maximum-security inmate who was not in a maximum-security facility. She’s going to be in therapy for two years.” 

About 9,400 maximum-security inmates are not in maximum-security facilities, including 480 who are housed dormitory-style in prison gymnasiums for lack of space, Green said. Even if the 5,000-bed Delano II prison opens as scheduled in 2004, he said the state will be short an estimated 6,000 maximum-security beds. The department predicts the maximum-security population will grow from 25,000 to 29,000 in five years. 

Lawmakers doubt those numbers, said Assemblywoman Dion Aroner, D-Berkeley. She and other lawmakers plan to call Tuesday for Davis to review the state’s security level classification system. 

“There are real questions being raised ... whether we’re identifying prisoners appropriately,” she said. 

Dan Macallair of the Justice Policy Institute contended that 18 percent of high-security beds, more than 10,000 of them, are filled with low security inmates. He argued the department will have a surplus of high security beds through 2005. 

Green welcomed a legislative review of the department’s figures. 

Even based on the department’s numbers, the department is predicting 23,000 fewer inmates than when lawmakers approved the new prison in 1999, Polanco said. A Kern County superior court judge earlier this month gave the department permission to solicit Delano II construction bids, after ruling in June that more environmental studies were needed. 

The state’s overall prison population dropped by 4,355 inmates to 157,142 during the second half of last year, according to new figures released by the department. 

That’s the biggest six-month drop at least since 1980, and is based on a voter-approved initiative that sends first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison or jail. However, the department lowered its long-term projections for the number of inmates who will be diverted by the Proposition 36 initiative. 

The move to build Delano II comes as the administration attempts to shut down five private prisons that supporters contend are the cheapest prisons to operate. Davis can fulfill a promise to shut down the private prisons in large part because of the drug treatment initiative that took effect July 1. 

Aroner and Polanco are trying to build a coalition of Hispanic and women lawmakers to oppose the Delano II prison, which would be the first new prison since 1995. Opponents estimate it will cost $595 million to build and operate the new Delano facility. 

While stopping Delano “is at the top of the list,” Aroner said, the lawmakers will suggest other money-saving changes, some of which will eventually be considered by the budget subcommittee she chairs. 

She said California should follow the lead of other states that are looking for alternatives to building new prisons. 

For instance, she said nonviolent inmates and prisoners over age 65 could be moved to community facilities, and one of California’s women’s prisons could be closed because drug offenders are being diverted by Proposition 36. 

In addition, she said many immigrants convicted of California crimes could be returned to their homelands to serve their sentences. While Davis is suggesting a similar program for immigrants, he’s not being aggressive enough, Aroner contended: “You go home where you belong,” she said. “It’s enough to fill five prisons.”