California's Prison System: An Orientation

As a member of a public oversight group I have recently had the experience of being exposed to the California Prison System. The group of which I am a member visits California prisons and County jails in order to monitor the treatment of citizens of the County from which we come. We do this to enable us to compare County treatment with that in the rest of the State. What I found was totally unexpected and shocking.

There are 33 State prisons, 38 camps, 16 community correctional facilities and 5 prisoner mother facilities in California under the jurisdiction of the California Department of Corrections (CDC). Four of these institutions are for women felons who make up 6% of the prison population.

The CDC employs 48,756 persons (30,689 of whom are sworn officers) and has a budget of $3.9B (5.96% of the State Budget for 2002-2003). There are currently 160,901 felons confined in these institutions of which 32.7% hail from Los Angeles County; the only double-digit county in the State. However, the total number of persons coming under the jurisdiction of the CDC is 303,901 since that Department also has cognizance over paroled felons. 25,111 of the total prison population have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The figures set forth above do not include prisoners in the jails and detention facilities in all the counties of California that house pre-trial prisoners and those sentenced to less than a year in jail.

My expectations were to find a well-ordered, efficient system where prisoners were cared for in a safe environment with multiple opportunities for rehabilitative training. These expectations are my idea of what should be the goals of the California prison system.

What I found was a brutal, violent, unsafe environment riddled with gang presence and influence and with very little realistic opportunity for rehabilitation. One must see these conditions to understand the magnitude of this abysmal scene. I have visited Wasco, Tehachapi, Corcoran, California Institution for Women, and many County facilities. Violence and the threat of violence permeates the air in these institutions, though it is not as palpable at the California Institution for Women.

Convicted felons are separated and classified at four Reception Centers and remain there until a "bed opens" in one of the regular prisons for a prisoner of his or her class. There are four classes of prisoners. They are classified on the basis of discrete criteria including, for example, the nature of their felony(ies), their past record, their age and attitude at confinement. The most dangerous are Class IV and they compose 20.8% of the population. Make no mistake about this; these people are truly dangerous people! 36.9% compose Class I and these are the folks we usually think about being in prison. Though they are relatively benign, the environment in which they live is not. It, too, is fraught with violence and the threat of violence.

Without going into detail in this limited "orientation" article, it is clear to me that massive changes need to be instituted in this system to bring to it better coherence with what ought to be the goals of the such a system. Those goals are those I described in the fourth paragraph of this article.