Schwarzenegger, Prison Crowding, and Three Strikes

So Schwarzenegger wants to call a special session of the legislature to get more prisons built. Over at Calitics, SFBrianCL notes that nobody is addressing the real problem behind crisis-level prison overcrowding: California's three strikes law. It's an excellent post; go read the whole thing.

I would go further and say that the Three Strikes law itself was a feeble attempt to deal with the complete failure of a purely retributive penal system.

At some point back in the tough-on-crime days of the '80s, the correctional system abandoned even the pretense of rehabilitation. The word 'rehabilitation' was actually removed from the CDC's charter; I suppose it was too reminiscent of bleeding-heart liberal approaches to crime. What they replaced rehabilitation with was...nothing. When I was interviewing inmates for a prison case a few years back, the word 'warehouse' came up in nearly every interview.

But here's the problem with that approach: realistically, 90% or more of the inmates at any given point are going to be back on the streets eventually. If there isn't a serious effort made to rehabilitate them, they're going to end up committing more (and more serious) crimes. (Most of them will, anyway, but you can still change things for a significant percentage.) If people aren't getting better in prison, they're getting a whole lot worse. Rehabilitation, in other words, is a practical necessity.

The other way to deal with this besides rehabilitation, of course, is the draconian measure of dictating that nobody gets out--that once you're in prison, you stay there for life. In theory this would make the streets safer, but it (obviously) means an unimaginably huge commitment of resources. The Three Strikes law (pushed by the correctional officers' union as a full-employment act) was a half-assed move in this direction, but it's really the worst of both worlds: it imposes costs on the state the size of which we have only begun to see, and it doesn't make us any safer.

That's the background for the current prison overcrowding crisis. Maybe people will set aside the tough-on-crime demagoguery long enough to truly reform the system. I'm not holding my breath.

[That's all, folks]