The concept has been around for a long time: If you let your maintenance slide, it’s going to cost more when you finally get around to doing it.
I recently relearned this by tearing out a redwood deck that I hadn’t bothered to clean or reseal for several years. It was literally falling apart, so I was forced to rip it down to the 4x6 support beams.
I’m not complaining — my fault, my loss — but at least my failing won’t hurt my neighbors or cost them a cent.
If only it were the same with the corrections system.
Alas, prisons aren’t redwood decks, and if we rip them apart — negligently pushing inmates back on to the street and cutting staff training to fix poorly maintained budgets — our neighbors are going to get robbed, they’re going to get hurt, and some might get killed.
Nonetheless, corrections budgets are being cut across the country, justified by two main arguments. Here’s why both of them are thoroughly flawed and totally dangerous.
The parole argument
What we today refer to as “the corrections system” has become a fairly large, complex, and expensive beast. In California alone — where, four and a half years ago, I retired as a lieutenant after 24 years with the DOC — 170,000 people are locked up in facilities designed for about 100,000. The issue has made national headlines and, consequently, a federal court order is giving us two years to shed 44,000 inmates.
Let me give you a small scale example of what’s wrong with this:
The San Joaquin County jail near where I live, like so many jails across the country, has a court-imposed population cap — they can only keep so many prisoners. If the count goes above that, somebody gets kicked out.
This leads to some interesting stupidity. Within the last year or so, a group of San Joaquin people — mostly related to each other — were repeatedly caught stealing metal from local farms. Wiring mostly, but they would take whatever they could lay their hands on. Despite their continued disregard for the law, they were kicked out of jail repeatedly due to lack of space.
Finally, after the fourth (I think) arrest in less than three weeks (they were pretty lame thieves), one of the arresting officers had a word with somebody and managed to keep them in jail — at least for a while.
Now Governor Schwarzenegger, under the pressure of the court mandate, is pushing to put more and more inmates out on parole and keep them out regardless of their conduct. He wants only “the real bad guys” (whoever they are) kept under close supervision.
He is a great believer in summary (unsupervised) parole for the lightweights. In addition, he is pushing to have fewer and fewer people RTC’d (Returned To Custody) for “minor violations” like drinking or turning in a bad drug test or hanging out with the old gang homies from the hood.
Some commitment offenses would, under the new plans, have no situation under which the parolee could be RTC’d without a new felony charge. He could not violate his parole in the legal sense. It would literally be impossible.
The problem is that it costs a lot of money to build effective parole and reentry systems. California’s recidivism rate is already at 70%, can we really assume that number is going to drop if we just push 44,000 more inmates into the street?
The prison argument
So what about cutting prison costs to save cash instead?
Well, if you want turnkeys, it’s true that you can get them cheap. All they need to do is let the boys out for chow, check the cells for dead bodies, let them back in after chow — repeat as needed. However, if you want trained, experienced professional correctional officers you’re not going to get them for $10.00 an hour with zero benefits.
It costs money to run a prison right. Further, in California you must do it right. The courts force it. You need trained staff to do that.
For instance, California has mandatory officer training for heat sensitivity – usually caused by psych meds. If it gets too hot, some inmates get to move to where it is cooler. Staff has to be trained yearly to evaluate heat sensitivity. It’s mandated. Staff has to be trained to spot depressed or potentially suicidal inmates and interact with them appropriately until medical staff can intervene. It’s mandated. Staff has to be trained on when to use force, how much force to use, how to report such use, how to rat out other staff for using too much force (whoops, did I say that out loud?).
Our basic training academy is 14 weeks and there is mandatory yearly refresher training on any number of issues, from handling legal mail properly to fire safety.
So, how can politicians possibly plan to cut staff budgets and still expect us to maintain their court mandated requirements?
The concept of “you get what you pay for” is not new, and it is very real: You can pay a kid from the neighborhood $10.00 to mow your lawn, but would you pay the same kid to adjust your transmission or paint your car? Probably not, and if you do happen to have a skilled transmission mechanic or body and paint person doing odd jobs in your neighborhood, you’re probably going to have to pay them a lot more than 10 bucks an hour.
We’ve got to get the word out
Correctional officers are not the knuckle-dragging semi-literates from the movies and television, despite what some from the media, the prisoners and their families and the advocates tell you. They can’t be. A semi-literate would never get through the academy, and a basic thug, even a fairly well concealed one, would eventually expose his true colors and be shown the door.
You don’t need (and you shouldn’t pay for) a lawyer cross-trained as a SWAT team officer to work in a prison, but you also shouldn’t have Paul Blart (of the Mall Cop movie) doing the job either. Blart might save a few dollars an hour for a few weeks — maybe even a few months if you’re lucky — but once the escapes, lawsuits and dead bodies start to stack up, you’ll realize your mistake.
So now all that is necessary is for those in our profession to successfully convince the general public of that. This is a task assigned to us all.