The policy of perpetual prison growth

Why must Stockton swallow three new prison facilities? Look no further than the Capitol, where this week the Assembly and Senate held hearings on state plans to cut rehabilitation spending nearly in half.

“The kicker is that, while the rehab budget gets halved, corrections is actually on pace to spend 10 percent more overall in 2009 than it did last year,” Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director for the Drug Policy Alliance in Southern California, said in a press release.

Let’s forget that the woman’s name is Dooley-Sammuli, which sounds like something out of a Mary Poppins movie. She’s right when she says, “California spends over $500 million a year to lock people up for nothing more than personal possession of an illicit drug. This is insanity and it’s time to have a serious discussion about smarter public safety policy and smarter spending. We are not going to make California safer by cutting funding for education, drug treatment and vocational training behind bars. Sacramento is suggesting that we can have either public safety or rehabilitation programs, when in fact these things are inseparable.”

I believe the prison guards union has an agenda to grow the prison system, not shrink it. That increase their ranks, strengthens their political power and ultimately increases their wages and benefits. But their support of ever-tougher laws that send more and more Californians to prison is smart policy only for them. For the state it is unsustainable folly. For Stockton it is even worse.