California's Prisons are Overcrowed, Yet the Governator Wants to Build More

A sad story on the end result of three-strikes laws and mandatory-sentencing laws. California's prisons are overcrowing, not to mention that its old prisoners are suffering from this too:

California’s prison population is approaching 175,000—a fivefold increase over the last quarter century. In October, with more than 16,000 prisoners sleeping in dayrooms and classrooms, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger decreed a state of emergency. Right before Christmas, he unveiled a proposal to build new prison and jail cells, at the cost of $10 billion, but there’s little chance the plan will make it through the legislature, which adjourned without considering a similar, albeit less expensive, proposal last summer. Analysts with the California prison system have warned that without new beds the system will soon begin turning away prisoners for lack of space.

Compounding the crisis is the fact that the prison population is graying. Nearly 8,000 of the state’s prisoners are over 55, a number that is projected to nearly quadruple over the next 20 years. The older a prisoner grows behind bars, the more health care he or she requires, including private hospital stays, so California’s non-prisoner elderly—like my father—are increasingly likely to find an inmate on every floor.

The previous week, at Marin General Hospital, down the road from San Quentin state prison, my dad had roomed next door to another prisoner, a wizened old man who was shackled to the bed and, as with the screamer, watched over by two highly paid round-the-clock guards. As the prison population ages, we can all look forward to this spectacle—our parents rooming with grizzled prisoners, many of them doing life sentences for non-violent crimes under three-strikes and other mandatory sentencing laws, all past the crime-prone years of early adulthood, all growing old, ill and costly at taxpayer expense.

The good news is that by releasing many of these old convicts, which are unlikely to reoffend the State can save nine billion a year. But as usual politicans want to maintain the problem.

The nonpartisan California legislative analyst’s office has suggested that if some of these prisoners were released—just the non-violent ones, whom research shows are extremely unlikely to re-offend in their golden years—we could save $9 million a year with no threat to public safety. The legislature has so far failed to respond. Lawmakers may finally be balking at building new prisons, but voting to release prisoners—any prisoners—one legislator told me ruefully, is considered political poison.

I do not care if it's political poison, the only way we can prevent a public security crisis is for the US to outlaw three-strikes and mandatory sentencing laws. Since these laws stem from the War on Drugs, we must also legalize drug use. If you have a better way to resolve this problem, I'm all ears.