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By Pat Nolan|Published Date: August 21, 2009
The recent bloody riot at the California Institution for Men in Chino is a wake-up call that our prison systems are in very serious trouble.
The Chino riot raged for 11 hours and injured 175 inmates. Men suffered vicious stab and head wounds as prisoners attacked each other with makeshift weapons, including shards of glass and broken water pipes. Fifty-five inmates were rushed to local hospitals. When officers finally took back control, many inmates had been permanently maimed.
But California isn’t the only prison bursting at the seams. On Monday, Aug. 17, a prisoner at the federal prison at Victorville, Calif., died as the result of wounds received in a fight on Sunday. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 19 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons are operating at more than 100 percent capacity. Another 20 states are on the close to being over maximum capacity. According to Harley Lappin, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, federal prisons will have to cram another 6,000 inmates into their already maxed-out facilities this year. Accommodating the influx, he said, may require triple bunking.
“Overcrowding is the first issue,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif., in a recent issue of Time magazine. “You’re talking about hundreds of men moved into triple bunks in what used to be gyms and cafeterias. They’re not even cells, just empty places where we’re shoving people.”
According to the most recent statistics from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, California’s 33 state prisons house 154,649 prisoners in facilities designed to hold just 84,271 prisoners. The Chino prison had 5,877 prisoners in a facility designed to hold 2,976.
But don’t blame corrections officers for these conditions. They are carrying out policies adopted by the legislature and the governor. Although meting out long sentences garners lots of headlines, it doesn’t provide the money to pay for them. Corrections officials have warned of the dangers of crowded prisons for years, but the government officials aren’t responding.
Some people say we shouldn’t care about these inmates and that guards should have held back and let the inmates fight until they had killed each other. My hunch is they wouldn’t be saying this if one of their sons or brothers were housed in Chino. But the truth is, when the government takes away an individual’s ability to defend himself, it assumes the responsibility of keeping him safe. In many cases, the government has failed this responsibility. It certainly failed at Chino.
Some government officials don’t seem to care. After hearing about the stabbings and broken bones, the eyes gouged out and the heads cracked open, Curt Hagman, local assemblyman for the Chino area shrugged and said, “By nature, prisons are violent.”
Prisons can be safe. There are prisons where violence is not a problem and where beatings and rapes do not occur. Rather than shrugging off the violence, leaders should be supporting corrections leaders who are trying to make prisons safe as well as restoring the programs that allow prisoners to prepare to live contributing and law-abiding lives after they are released.
In Louisiana, Angola State Prison is the largest maximum security prison in the country. Until a few years ago, it was also America’s most violent. The inmates slept with metal plates or phone books on their chests to prevent stabbings. Under the leadership of Warden Burl Cain, that has changed. Angola is now the safest prison in the United States, largely because Cain shows inmates respect. Although 98 percent of them will die in that prison, he promises inmates good food, good medicine, good fun and good praying.
I have visited Angola and have seen the difference. Most inmates in maximum security look away out of fear, but at Angola, they look you in the eye. They are taught how to prepare delicious food by New Orleans chefs. A seminary in the prison trains men to become pastors to their fellow prisoners. They have a great time at the annual rodeo, which draws thousands of local residents who get a chance to see that the inmates are human, just like them.
As a member of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and also a member of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s prisons, I had the chance to learn from corrections professionals what steps can be taken to make prisons safe and prevent them from descending into violence. Leadership is a critical element in establishing a safe environment for staff, inmates and volunteers. But even good leaders have a harder time if inmates are packed liked sardines in a can. Both commissions identified prison crowding as one of the key factors leading to physical assaults and rapes in prisons.
All of us should care what happens in prisons because 95 percent of inmates will serve their time and be released to our communities. When they are released, what kind of neighbors will they be? The skills the inmates develop to survive violent prisons like Chino make them dangerous when they are released. It shouldn’t be this way.
Elected officials in some states have shown that it is possible to lower prison populations while keeping the public safe. Last year, under the bipartisan leadership of Rep. Jerry Madden and Sen. John Whitmire, Texas enacted sweeping corrections reforms shifting low risk inmates to facilities in the community. As a result, “Tough on Crime” Texas was able to scrap plans to build three more prisons. They redirected a large part of the money saved into community treatment for the mentally ill and low-level drug addicts. The results are promising. The state has stopped sending its overflow of prisoners to already crowded county jails. And for the first time ever, all drug addicts in the system are receiving treatment.
Other states are making the same sensible changes. Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina and South Carolina have all joined Texas in reducing their prison population while also slashing crime rates.
These states are saving hundreds of millions of dollars by reserving costly prison beds for truly dangerous criminals, while keeping low-risk offenders accountable in the community. They are reducing the need for prisons by using new technologies to monitor parolees’ location and behavior, and providing more effective supervision and treatment programs to help them avoid criminal lifestyles. Re-entry initiatives are teaching inmates to succeed as law-abiding citizens. It is time for the rest of the states and the federal prisons to follow suit.
The next time politicians promise to lengthen sentences, ask them if they are willing to support more money to house the increase in inmates caused by the longer sentences. If they aren’t willing to spend the dime, they shouldn’t be voting for more time.
In His Service,
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