By Marisa Lagos
The San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — In 2007, under increasing pressure to reduce crowding in the state’s prisons, lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger authorized $7.4 billion in bonds to expand the prisons and local jails to add 53,000 new beds.
Nearly four years later, as Schwarzenegger leaves office today, the state has not completed a single project authorized by that bill, AB900, and has begun planning or construction for only about 8,400 beds.
Most of the projects in the pipeline — which include adding beds to existing county jails and building health care and re-entry facilities — have been approved in the past few months.
Now, some critics question whether the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, should pursue all of the projects approved under the measure. Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he believes the state should undertake a “serious review” of AB900, noting that lawmakers have instituted other reforms to deal with crowding since 2007 — including medical parole for severely incapacitated inmates — and that the state’s crime rate has declined.
Ryan Sherman, a spokesman for the prison guards union, which opposed AB900, said the construction authorized by the bill will not solve the state’s prison crisis.
Construction not answer
“The state cannot build its way out of the overcrowding prison problem,” he said. “If they build more beds, we will fill up more beds and continue to be overcrowded. Until we figure out how to reform and reorganize the department so it’s efficient and accountable, and take into consideration the limited budget and what’s best for the state, I don’t anticipate anything improving a great deal.”
A spokesman for Brown declined to comment. Scott Kernan, undersecretary for operations at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the department hasn’t been able to construct the projects “as quickly as possible” because of delays caused by a number of factors, including lawsuits over several of the projects and difficulty selling bonds during the economic downturn.
Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton said the new administration will have to decide how it wants to proceed, but noted that the “need for prison and jail beds is still an ongoing need.”
Challenges got in way
Supporters, including the measure’s author, said it’s too soon to give up on the plan. State Assemblyman Jose Solorio, D-Anaheim, said the Schwarzenegger administration “could have done more and acted more quickly” to build new prison beds, but said the governor and prison officials faced valid challenges.
“I think there were a lot of budgetary and environmental restraints that made some construction elements not go as quickly,” he said, referring to lawsuits that were filed over the environmental impact of some of the projects. “Large infrastructure projects do take a long time to build. ... Maybe it’s been a little slower than I’d thought, but given what it takes to build a new large, public works project in California, it doesn’t surprise me where we’re at.”
In recent years, the crowding problem at state prisons has eased, but it still persists. State corrections officials say there are now about 8,200 inmates crowded into “nontraditional” sleeping quarters in gyms and dayrooms, down from 20,000 in 2006. The drop in population is largely the result of shipping inmates out of state to private prisons and transferring others to county jails.
Legal case
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether a panel of federal judges had the authority in 2009 to order California to reduce its prison population by 40,000 inmates. The order was the result of a lawsuit over the state’s woeful health care system for inmates. A judge found in 2006 that about 50 inmates a year were dying unnecessarily.
At oral arguments last month, a majority of the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to uphold the lower court’s order — a scenario that would leave Brown responsible for reducing the state’s prison population by about 30,000 inmates.
Solorio said that regardless of the high court’s decision, California needs to continue to reduce its prison population. AB900, he said, “provides a lot of tools” for the incoming governor.
Prison projects bill AB900 was approved by the Legislature and signed by the governor in 2007. Among the $7.4 billion in projects authorized:16,000 additional beds at existing prisons.16,000 beds at re-entry facilities, which provide intensive rehabilitation services to prepare inmates for release.8,000 beds at medical or mental health prison facilities.13,000 additional beds at existing county jails.
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