California Cramming the Slammer

The photographs shock, as they are intended to do. In one, men lie pinned in triple-bunked beds jammed one against the next, packed nearly too tightly to turn over, much less stand. In another, a woman sits astride her top bunk, her meal before her on the top of her locker -- the only alternative to breakfast in bed. In another, prisoners sit or lie on cots jammed so closely together that one man's naked shoulder brushes up against another's tattooed forearm. "Jimnacio," reads a sign on the wall, indicating this human cattle pen's original function.

The photos don't come from a border prison in Tijuana, nor are they archival images of a Soviet gulag. They have not been posted by some human rights group seeking to reveal intolerable prison conditions here in the United States. They come from the official Web site of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation -- the system itself exposing its underbelly, begging for relief.

This public plea for mercy is a far cry from just a few years ago, when the California prison guards union teamed with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to produce a series of misleading television ads that sunk a previously popular initiative that would have limited California's Three Strikes law to repeat violent offenders, rather than locking up for life pizza-snatchers and bad-check writers. This law, and other increasingly harsh and rigid sentencing laws, have created the overcrowding the governor now has been ordered to resolve, lest a federal judge take over the state's correctional system.

Having failed to get an $11 billion prison-building package past the legislature; then, more recently, having been thwarted by a Superior Court judge in his efforts to start shipping inmates to private prisons out-of-state, Schwarzenegger has been reduced to floating the politician's last resort: proposing to let a few prisoners -- those he has deemed "the old, feeble and sick" -- out the back door early.

Whether this latest scheme will meet the fate of the governor's previous proposals remains to be seen, but the desperation it reflects is not limited to California. A newly released study by the Pew Charitable Trusts predicts that the U.S. prison population -- which grew 700 percent over the last quarter century, and already tops any country on the planet, at any period in history -- will increase another 13 percent over the next five years, costing states an additional to $27.5 billion.

More
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=4c8c2c6575401ba799539d3e05f96f64