You don’t have to go entirely Scandinavian in your approach to how best to treat incarcerated Californians to believe that rehabilitative programs for prisoners are a good idea, as the vast majority of them will join the rest of us in society sooner or later.
Prison may be by nature a hard school, and felons deserve to be punished for their crimes.
But it’s nothing like coddling them to support prisoners being able to take classes, some of them college-level, and participate in programs and counseling that impact their mental health and well being. It’s good for them; it’s good for us. It sure beats prisoners spending all their free hours in the lock-up pumping iron in the weight room or, worse, wasting away in their cells.
As the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters reports, “Hundreds of rehabilitative programs operate throughout California prisons, including restorative justice, violence prevention, higher education, creative arts expression and entrepreneurial training.”
But late last month CalMatters’ Cayla Mihalovich also reported that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation “is restricting access to rehabilitative programming for incarcerated people as it clamps down on overtime spending before the end of its financial year.”
Given the woefully bloated state budget that was and is in sincere need of cost-cutting in order to come into balance, we certainly understand and approve of efforts in the Legislature to pare back on the outlay of our tax dollars. Toward that end, the overall corrections budget has stayed about flat for the last four years, at about $18 billion a year. This steady spending level comes even with recent cuts that include five prison closures.
According to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, California spends a whopping $127,800 per prisoner annually to keep convicted people behind bars. The No. 1 line item in those costs is labeled “Security,” at over $52,000 per year, for which you can mostly read “the cost of paying prison guards,” more on which in a moment.
Because if you were to talk to prison wardens, they would also note, and correctly so, the No. 2 line item: health care, at over $41,000 annually. The breakdown: medical care, $26,880; mental health care, $8,123; pharmaceuticals, $4,835; dental care, $1,997. This is, to put it plainly, nuts, and is more than most not-incarcerated Californians spend on health. The high cost of health spending comes in the wake of lawsuits maintaining that California prisoners’ health needs were being neglected.
But it should never be forgotten that the biggest recipient of California Correctional Peace Officers Association political donations is Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has received over $4 million in campaign donations from the union since he took office.
Three years ago, the union, which represents about 10% of state employees, negotiated a $1 billion raise for its members. It’s more than a little interesting to note that as lawmakers urged the prisons to cut back on expenses to help balance the state budget, the corrections department was asking for an additional $91 million in ongoing funding to cover unbudgeted personnel costs. In May, the department last also proposed an additional $100 million be set aside for workers compensation costs.
If the full name of what is now known as the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is to mean anything at all, it shouldn’t be cutting back on programming and classes that improve the chance of ex-cons’ success in the wider world.