To California’s cons: Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time

OK, excuse me while I see how much sympathy I can work up for the inmates in California’s prisons.

Umm, yep, sorry -- not really feeling the love, guys.

As you know, 30,000 or so unfairly incarcerated choirboys at several state prisons, including Pelican Bay and Folsom, began refusing to eat their meals Monday. They have a number of complaints; at Pelican Bay, those mostly revolve around, as The Times’ Paige St. John reported, “conditions in solitary confinement, where inmates may be held indefinitely without access to phone calls or rehabilitation programs, or outdoor exercise beyond a concrete pen.”

But wait, there’s more!

A list of demands from inmates in the new section of Folsom Prison near Sacramento, and posted online by inmate advocates, takes a slightly different approach than others.

Their “declaration of terms” dispenses with requests for increased canteen foods or art supplies and asks for a moratorium on indefinite housing of inmates on death row and solitary confinement, parole hearings for those serving indeterminate sentences, and changes in state sentencing laws to end mandatory minimums and sentencing enhancements, another other things.

“Our liberties are our demands,” the unsigned four-page treatise states, “anything less than the broader core issues that keeps prisoners suppressed; looking for pacification and comfort behind enemy lines is delusional.”

Hmm, can you guys wait while I go get my violin?

Fellows, let me give you what I suspect is the average Joe’s take on this: You are criminals. You did very bad things. You forfeited your rights when you did those things. And now you are in prison for, hopefully, quite a long time.

Granted, life at Pelican Bay is no picnic. Is it inhumane? Certainly Amnesty International thinks so; it released a report last year calling the solitary confinement policies there “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in violation of international law.”

And as a Times editorial described it:

Suspected gang members are often placed in Security Housing Units, isolated cells in which they are confined with little or no human contact, released for only an hour and a half a day to exercise alone in a narrow yard. Psychologists believe this kind of confinement to be mentally destabilizing, and the numbers from Amnesty would appear to back that up: Although the 3,000 inmates in solitary make up only about 2% of the prison population, they accounted for 42% of the suicides from 2006 to 2010.

Yes, that treatment sounds extreme. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for the state to take a look at alternatives. Certainly guards and staff and “innocent” prisoners deserve to be safe, even in a prison -- but perhaps you don’t have to actually lock people up and throw away the key.

The bottom line, though, is that the folks in Folsom, and Pelican Bay, and other high-security prisons in California earned their fate. They had choices. They chose to be tough guys, to be criminals. And now, the harsh reality of prison life is too harsh?

Well, guess what: As the theme song of “Baretta” warned: “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

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