Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 8, 1994 TAG: 9405080054
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: FOLSOM, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
For most car-hopping Californians, many of the state's new prisons are within an easy Sunday drive.
The prison tourist soon recognizes their outline on the horizon.
Forget the Hollywood sign, cable cars, redwoods. The symbol of California as the millennium nears is a computer-designed lockup.
Twenty-eight prisons dot the California landscape, commonplace as Kmarts. Another 12 had been planned by century's end, but the state's new "three strikes, you're out" law will require 20 more instead.
The inmate population: 120,000 and counting, at an average cost of $24,000 per prisoner per year.
For that kind of investment, you'd expect assurance that prisons work. But the fact is, no one has proved prisons curb crime at all.
For Craig Brown, the state's undersecretary for Youth and Adult Corrections, it's easy: Citizens should be pleased. "There's 120,000 people," he says, "who are not hurting them or stealing from them today in California."
Such reassurance comes at a price.
When the state budget was adopted last year, only corrections spending grew.
Similar contrasts can be found elsewhere. They may become sharper, as more public money is devoted to putting more lawbreakers away - and for longer - to solve what seems like an intractable problem.
For the first time in U.S. history, criminal justice spending per capita exceeds that for education nationwide, according to a study by William Chambliss, a sociologist at George Washington University.
"At this rate, we will be seeing an even greater increase in the number of people in prison and a higher incidence of illiteracy," said Chambliss, a former president of the American Society of Criminology.
"We're trading textbooks for prison cells."
The folks in Folsom do not advertise their prison complex. When a second prison opened in 1986, neighbors insisted the state plant trees to block the view.
But behind green hills where cattle graze and deer step lightly, live about 7,800 criminals, spread among old Folsom prison, the newer California State Prison-Sacramento and a third facility for parole-breakers.
The three facilities serve as a history of California prison explosion.
"The California system used to be the model correctional system in the '60s," said Professor Alfred Blumstein, an authority on prisons at Carnegie Mellon University. "It was very sophisticated about how it made decisions. It had the appropriate mix between community-based programs [and prisons]. It was very innovative."
Then, baby boomers came of criminal age in the late 1960s and into the '70s, and crime surged. Like other Americans, Californians lost faith that the world could be made safer if criminals got more kind attention.
Savvy office-seekers of the '70s peppered speeches with references to "law and order." In 1977, the state penal code switched the focus from rehabilitation to punishment.
Later, more than 1,000 new crime laws were enacted. Most either lengthened sentences or reclassified misdemeanors as felonies - among them, domestic violence, all burglaries, drunken driving, rape and using a gun in a crime.
But where to put all the new lawbreakers?
By the end of the 1970s, only 12 prisons existed, housing 22,000 men and women. In a frenzy, California embarked on the largest prison-building project in U.S. history: $5.2 billion to put up 40 prisons.
Still, some people have had second thoughts.
Seeking options, state lawmakers in 1987 created the Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management. Three years later, the panel recommended more alternatives, such as probation with intensive supervision, giving more money and responsibility to counties to deal with nonviolent offenders, and expanding drug treatment.
The proposal went nowhere.
"The electorate doesn't want these things," said Brown, the corrections undersecretary. "The electorate wants prisons. They want people locked up."
In March - in the wake of the arrest of Richard Davis, a violent parolee accused of stealing 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her bed in Petaluma and killing her - Gov. Pete Wilson added to the state's commitment to imprison by signing the "three strikes" law.
Now, anyone who commits two violent crimes faces 25 years to life if convicted of a third serious felony, whether rape, murder, a house burglary or a drug sale.
Analysts expect that 80 state prisons will be needed within 30 years to house those anticipated 276,000 inmates. Projected costs are staggering: $21 billion for construction, with yearly operating costs reaching $5.7 billion.
It is certain that there will be more cells and more prisoners like Anthony Stephens, 24. In age, criminal history and prospects, he is typical of those the system snares.
Stephens works in the prison welding shop, one project shy of a pipe-welding certificate and eager to finish. In a few weeks, he'd be paroled and need work.
"Prison, for me, I would call a stepping stone," Stephens said. He'd parlayed a juvenile conviction for a $20 sale of crack cocaine and then a 20-minute armed heist into an opportunity to wise up.
California officials crow that reported crime has leveled off since peaking in 1980 - just as it did nationwide. They don't point out that was four years before the first of the new prisons opened.
Closer inspection finds property crime down, while violent crime is up; they cancel each other out on paper, if not in life.
It adds up to this, experts agree: Prisons pose no clear threat to the crime rate. A 1993 Rand Corp. study concluded as much.
Joan Petersilia, head of criminal justice research at the Santa Monica-based consulting firm, reviewed two decades of state spending on crime and prisons:
"The massive investment in crime control - and the doubling and redoubling of the prison population in recent years - may have had little effect on California's crime rate, particularly violent crime."
More to the point: A decade and a half into the crusade for incarceration, its people feel no safer.
by CNB