Introduction

A fundamental purpose for government is to guard the public safety. "Establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility" were the words used by the nation's founders. The drafters of California's Constitution premised statehood on the protection of certain rights -- principal among them, "acquiring, possessing and protecting property and pursuing and obtaining safety."⁽¹⁾

Generations later, the body of federal and state law fills entire libraries. But as the last decade attests, the breadth and scope of those laws are overshadowed by the public's unwavering concern with personal safety. The Berlin Wall fell, nuclear weapons were dismantled and the threat of a third world war slipped further into the realm of fiction -- but the rise in violent crime, the emergence of street gangs, and the very real War on Drugs challenged society's collective sense of security.

Crime has dominated headlines and captured political agendas. High- profile crimes produced high-profile policies.

Programs were funded to save young people from the clutches of criminality. More police were put on the beat. And a great deal more resources were spent to deal sternly with convicted criminals -- relying overwhelmingly on incarceration to punish the guilty and protect the innocent.

In the broader view, jails and prisons are at the end of a long social continuum. The steel walls, coils of razor wire and now electrified fences have come to represent in the minds of many the failure of families, schools and social programs to develop in individuals the skills and character to abide by the social compact.

Impatience, frustration and fear have spawned dozens of bills over the last decade that "get tough" on criminals. While the State's sentencing laws are complex, one such reform characterizes, simply and universally, the public sentiment -- "Three Strikes." The law enacted by the vote of lawmakers and the people in 1994, requires that the sentences for individuals convicted of a prior felony be doubled and on the third felony that they be sentenced to a minimum of 25 years.

Three Strikes alone is not responsible for the dramatic growth in prisons and the inmate population. The precise reasons for the increasing prison population are actually debated among experts. But certainly tougher stands by prosecutors and judges, stiffer sentencing laws, more crimes, more arrests and just more people in general have contributed to the surge in incarceration.

California builds the biggest prisons in the nation. And California's prison population is growing at a pace that could fill two new prisons every year. Each prison costs $280 million to build and $80 million a year to operate. In the last 13 years the State has opened 21 new prisons, yet prisons are more crowded today than they were before the construction boom began. The California Department of Corrections (CDC) asserts that to safely house the increasing prison population, 17 new prisons are needed before 2001 -- which would require doubling the $5 billion investment the State has made in new prisons over the last 15 years ⁽²⁾

Those facts, more than any others, have delivered California to a crossroads in how it can best deal with criminals.

The facts that policy makers should consider seriously when deciding which path to pursue are these:

• Approximately 90 percent of the inmates in state prison are eventually released back to the community.⁽³⁾
• More than half of the 154,000 inmates in prison today will be released within the next two years.⁽⁴⁾
• And while the State inadequately tracks individuals, it is known that within the next two years more than half of the released inmates will be convicted of new crimes.⁽⁵⁾

Policy makers face some difficult choices. The public still favors incarceration, but public support for funding new prisons has waned, especially when neighborhood schools and regional freeways are as overcrowded as prisons in the hinterlands. After approving five prison bond measures between 1981 and 1990, voters in November 1990 rejected a bond measure to finance new prisons.

Annual state budgeting is in some ways a zero-sum game and for the last decade building and operating prisons has taken on more and more of the small slice of the state budget that is discretionary.

In addition to the dichotomy of public opinion, policy makers in search of consensus have been frustrated by a lack of solid research and evaluation of existing programs. Sociology and criminology are not precise sciences. Research findings often deliver conflicting conclusions. At best there are gaps in the evidence. But more frequently the research is methodologically inadequate or advocacy is masqueraded as research. As a result, policy makers often are required to make decisions based on faith as well as fact.

As is typical in public policy, California's correctional challenges are larger in scale than those of any other state. But California can find some solace -- and even some hopeful opportunities in new correctional directions being chartered throughout the United States. Among them:

• Drug Treatment and Criminal Rehabilitation. Significant progress has been made in just the last five years in documenting the success of drug treatment programs in reducing recidivism. When conducted properly and linked with education, job skills and reintegration services, the treatment programs could significantly reduce the number of released felons who violate parole or commit new crimes.
• More Private Options. Nationally, a private corrections industry has matured, creating the potential to align the innovation and efficiencies inherent to competitive service delivery with the public interest of safely housing and reforming convicted felons.
• Re-examination of Local Options. Crowded prisons and jails in California and across the nation have forced local communities to reassess their options and obligations for dealing with low-level criminals. Not everything works, but evidence is growing that a variety of community administered sanctions that are more intensive than parole but less costly than incarceration can be used to deal safely with certain criminals.

Together, these elements have the potential to ease the immediate inmate population crisis and provide an affordable long-term approach to dealing with sentenced felons.

Under the current strategy, more than $500 million a year will have to be spent indefinitely to construct additional prisons. Those estimates renewed the Little Hoover Commission's interest into the State's correctional policies. But the Commission quickly realized that design and construction is just a small part of the prison price tag. And the Commission was encouraged by a number of stakeholders to take a broader perspective, reviewing the State's overall incarceration strategy.

This study, of course, is not the first to examine this issue. The Legislative Analyst routinely has encouraged a full examination of the State's options for housing prisoners. The Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management provided policy makers with a road map for prison reform in 1990. And this Commission's 1994 study dealt with every issue from sentencing strategy to educational programs and medical parole for aged and infirmed inmates.

But some of the factors underlying the political debate of the last few years are changing. And the State has different options than it did at the dawn of this decade.

In conducting its study, the Commission empaneled an Advisory Committee and held sessions covering four general issue areas -- strategic planning, design and construction, alternative sanctions and privatization. The sessions were used to inform the Commission on the history, issues and potential reforms in those areas. A list of the Advisory Committee members is in Appendix A.

In addition, the Commission conducted three public hearings, in June, August and September of 1997. It heard from a variety of state officials, correctional practitioners and national experts. A list of the witnesses are in Appendix B.

Commissioners visited a number of prisons, spoke with prisoners, correctional officers and wardens. A list of the facilities visited is in Appendix C.

The Commission conducted extensive literature searches and interviews.

The Commission's conclusions are a product of this process and are documented in this report. Because of the urgency of this issue, the Commission has developed recommendations that it believes to be politically feasible and financially practical.

The report begins with a Transmittal letter, an Executive Summary and this Introduction. The following sections include a Background and six chapters that are divided into three sections: Systematic Overcrowding, Maximizing the Existing System, and Performance-Based System Expansion. The report closes with a Conclusion, Appendices and Endnotes.