Children Will Foot the Bill for California's Prison Expansion

SAN FRANCISCO--When the California legislature opens a special session next month in response to the state's long-brewing prison crisis, it will also, by necessity, be considering the fate of thousands of the state's children -- children whose parents are or will be locked up in California's overflowing prisons. Legislators owe these children a careful reading of the "Inmate Population, Rehabilitation, and Housing Management Plan" put forth by the governor and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

The most widely touted bits of the plan would create smaller, more rehabilitation-driven facilities for a small portion of the state's 170,000 prisoners -- 4,500 women who have committed non-violent, non-serious offenses, and 5,000 men and women who are nearing their release dates. These "mini-prisons," as the report calls them, would put prisoners closer to their families and presumably allow them more opportunity to maintain family relationships -- a well-established predictor of successful re-entry.

Other states have in fact used similar approaches to reduce recidivism and stem the growth of their prison systems. But the governor and his planners seem to anticipate no such benefit in California. Instead -- citing current over-crowding and CDCR analysts' population projections over the next 15 years -- they plan immediately to fill each bed vacated by those transferred to community-based facilities with another prisoner, and in the long-term to build and fill more than 50,000 new prison beds, at a cost of about $3.5 billion.

"A successful corrections system doesn't grow," the criminologist Stephen Richards has observed. "If they were correcting anyone, they'd shrink." Citing the proposed women's facilities in particular, the CDCR has advertised its latest blueprint as family-friendly. But the impact on children and families of budgeting for a continued expansion of California's already out-of-control prison system -- of planning for continued failure -- far outweighs the benefit these few facilities promise.

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