By Karen de Sá
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — As in many parts of California, nearly a third of Santa Clara County’s jail beds sit empty, thanks to plunging crime rates and get-tough laws that have sent more offenders than ever to prison.
Meanwhile, those prisons are so overcrowded that the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether the state should be forced to release tens of thousands of inmates.
Against that backdrop, and with the budget in crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown’s new plan to send thousands of low-risk convicts, and all youth offenders, to county lockups is being hailed by many as an idea whose time has come.
Brown says the sweeping reforms, if enacted by the Legislature in March, would save close to half a billion dollars next fiscal year — and $1.4 billion annually in the long haul — while relieving overcrowding.
The plan also responds to years of advice from criminologists, finance experts and justice advocates who say reducing the prison population could enhance public safety by placing low-level offenders closer to their families and community-based treatment programs.
“This is just an incredibly massive shift for a state system that was sending everybody and their brother to prison,” said Joan Petersilia, a Stanford University criminal justice expert. Petersilia, who has worked with two gubernatorial administrations on the change, described it as “the most significant in California history.”
But she offered widely echoed caution: “We shouldn’t be naive and think we can do this on the cheap — these offenders have serious needs.”
Under Brown’s plan, the state would stop housing 37,000 adult convicts each year who are short-timers, low-level offenders and parole violators. Those groups instead would be held in county jails at a cost some experts say could be half the current burden.
Costs for housing juvenile offenders would plunge as well; the state has paid as much as a quarter-million dollars annually for each young inmate. Eliminating the entire Division of Juvenile Justice would save the state $250 million a year, Brown says.
While California’s adult prison population has burgeoned, the number of juvenile offenders in state custody has plunged, due in part to a 2007 law that shifted all but the most serious and violent offenders to counties.
Dan Macallair, director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, said the shift has left no justification for the high cost of revamping the aging youth prisons, as a state court has ordered. “It’s the definition of insanity,” Macallair said. “We’ve spent too much time, energy and resources on something we could not fix.”
Yet even some of the most ardent critics of the youth prison system — including attorneys behind the lawsuit charging inhumane conditions — say the governor is going too far. They maintain that some state institution, however scaled-back, must be available for serious juvenile offenders whose counties lack appropriate treatment programs.
Such concerns, along with objections from local law enforcement, helped scuttle Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s push for similar reforms.
But the economic crisis is prompting a reconsideration. County officials beaten down by budget cuts are cautiously embracing the change — if they’re given the resources to house more offenders and provide addiction and mental health treatment and job training.
“We’ve got the space, they don’t have the space,” Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said. “When there is serious overcrowding, it’s detrimental to the inmates, and it’s also detrimental to staff. So this seems to be a solution, providing our costs are covered.”
According to statistics compiled by criminologist James Austin — an expert in the federal court proceedings that found the state’s overcrowded prisons violate the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment — there are now about 12,500 jail beds available in California’s 10 largest counties. Given a staggered release of inmates, those beds could accommodate the majority of those who would be moved under Brown’s plan, Austin says.
Santa Clara County officials say more than 1,700 of their 5,420 jail beds are empty, including one 320-bed unit at the Elmwood Correctional Facility that’s been shut down altogether. With more staffing, jail officials say, they could safely house hundreds more.
Local facilities that could house the state’s youth offenders also have capacity, according to Macallair’s justice center. Thanks to a spate of juvenile hall construction in the late 1990s, the center reported that there are enough beds in county institutions to house the entire state juvenile justice population “and still have 200 to 1,000 empty beds remaining.”
The availability of beds and the associated costs are debated, however. In San Mateo County, for example, Sheriff Greg Munks said his jail is already at least 130 percent over capacity. And although the county has bought land to build a new jail, construction has not begun.
Nick Warner, legislative director for the California State Sheriffs’ Association, said 34 counties are at capacity — and if beds are not added in those jails, some inmates would have to be released early to make room.
“If the money were there, we think there’s a workable solution,” he said. “But without the money, this is the worst public safety proposal the state of California has ever seen.”
Indeed, funding could be key to the plan’s long-term success. Brown hopes voters will extend three statewide taxes in a June special election; if they don’t, the administration says it can still pay for local jails to house state inmates, but there may not be enough for training and treatment programs to keep them from reoffending.
Despite that risk, Brown and reform experts say they can’t defend the state’s current cost of locking up so many offenders.
According to state reports, 11,000 prisoners served less than 30 days in 2009, and 47,000 served three months or less. These inmates spent most of their time in county jails before being shipped to the state.
“The cost of sending people to state prison for a week or a month is huge,” said Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin State Prison and now a senior fellow at UC Berkeley. At state reception centers, she noted, many of the same medical tests, psychological screening and caseworker reports done in county jails are repeated.
“No one,” Woodford says, “thinks just taking a bus ride to state prison makes our communities safer.”
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