No Matter How You Dress It Up....

You can't just build a prison and call it a "re-entry prison" and it suddenly is what it isn't. The new plan in California is try and save money by building smaller prisons, decreasing service and visitation and make them easy to manage by putting the lowest level of security risks in them. There are volumes of studies available that show what does and doesn't work to help people get back on their feet, and to ignore all that and try to dress up new prisons by giving them a new name is ludicrous.

Like my mom always said, "If it looks like a pig, and smells like a pig, it's probably a pig."

During this time of transistion in Colorado, we need to be confident that we aren't getting pigs.

California's prison system is in total crisis; the prison health care system is in federal receivership; the Little Hoover Commission has issued a scathing report on the Legislature for promoting punitive incarceration. The state's prison population has grown to more than 172,000 and the overcrowded conditions are scandalous. There is little doubt that the core problem can be attributed to our "tough-on-crime" sentencing laws, which too often target nonviolent drug offenders.

Given this obvious disastrous state of affairs, it is inconceivable that the governor is proposing building 78,000 new prison, jail and juvenile detention beds at a cost of $10.9 billion. At the same time, he has recommended slashing funding for Proposition 36, the landmark treatment-instead-of-incarceration prison reform law that has successfully helped more than 140,000 Californians to enter treatment and has saved the state an estimated $1.3 billion in the past five years.

A part of the plan is to build so-called "re-entry" prisons. In December, Assemblywoman Sally Lieber introduced legislation (Assembly Bill 76) for 15 new 200-bed women's prisons, including at least one in San Diego. Although "re-entry" is a nice word, so is "rehabilitation," and so far, by adding the word "rehabilitation" to the California Department of Corrections (and Rehabilitation), the only change we have witnessed is a change of letterhead. The idea is that these facilities would house "nonviolent, non-serious female offenders" who, according to the Department of Corrections, don't need to be incarcerated. OK, that sounds therapeutic, so what is the problem with the plan?

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