By Karen de Sá and Irma Widjojo
Vallejo Times Herald
VALLEJO, Calif. — Solano County may receive 25 more inmates every month if the Legislature approves Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to shift thousands of state prisoners to counties, and Sheriff Gary Stanton is worried.
Brown proposes to send thousands of low-risk convicts, and all youth offenders, to county lockups to relieve overcrowding in state facilities.
The plan, Brown said, would save nearly a half-billion dollars in the next fiscal year, and $1.4 billion annually over the long haul.
Solano County Sheriff Gary Stanton — while agreeing that the plan could be a start in the right direction — said it is still a very “rough proposal” and “very poorly thought out.”
Stanton said the two county jail facilities can house nearly 1,100 inmates. However, Stanton said he lost 20 percent of his staff 18 months ago in budget cuts, so the county has enough staff to mind only about 800 beds, he said, while 286 beds must go used.
More often than not, the jails are at capacity, he said.
“The plan will very quickly overrun my ability to run the facilities,” Stanton said. “This will work if we have the funding to have more staff to successfully and safely house more inmates.”
Nick Warner, legislative director for the California State Sheriffs’ Association, said jails in 34 counties already are at capacity — and if beds are not added in those jails, some inmates would have to be released early to make room, which is also one of Stanton’s worries.
“Seven out of 10 people re-offend after they’re released,” Stanton said, “so this will also impact the community.”
Stanton said without more operational and funding details, the local authorities will be hard pressed to make the plan work.
“We want to make this work, but we really need to sit down with the state to hammer the details out,” he said. “We need it quickly, hopefully by February, so we can make the appropriate plans.”
“If the money were there, we think there’s a workable solution,” Warner said. “But without the money, this is the worst public safety proposal the state of California has ever seen.”
Despite the logistical concerns, Brown’s idea 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, says that 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.”
Some of the most ardent critics of the youth prison system say Brown is going too far. They maintain that some state institutions, however scaled-back, must be available for serious juvenile offenders whose counties lack appropriate treatment programs.
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.
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,” she says, “thinks just taking a bus ride to state prison makes our communities safer.”
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