The L.A. Prison Flap Reveals a Bias That Will Haunt the GOP

Over the last few weeks, the state Senate has been locked in battle with the governor over the placement of a state prison in downtown Los Angeles--the heart of California’s largest Latino community.

Everyone, including the Legislature, agrees that more prison beds are needed to alleviate overcrowding. Most Californians, particularly those who don’t live in Los Angeles, agree that the state’s biggest county, which generates nearly 40% of the inmate population, should host at least one prison. Yet the matter has been hung up on a very important principle: the right of a community to have a say in what the state will or will not impose upon it. And the nature of that community, and the governor’s relationship to it, has profound implications for California’s political future.

The governor insists on this course of action despite the community’s objection to yet another project that may debase its quality of life and inhibit its development. Most communities reject the notion of a prison in their midst; that is hardly remarkable. What is significant in this case is the fact that the Deukmejian Administration chose to disregard this particular community’s objections.

Los Angeles County certainly is not short on empty land, away from residences, which might accommodate a correctional facility (particularly in its northeastern corner). But these areas tend to be Republican precincts, places where George Deukmejian’s friends live. Places with political clout. Their objections to a prison, as valid as anyone else’s, are respected and heeded. Not so for East Los Angeles and its Latino community.

Deukmejian is not a racist--far from it. Because of the pain associated with his own ethnic heritage, he is sensitive to racial concerns. But the cavalier attitude of his Administration in dealing with the Latino community on this issue gives evidence of a basic flaw throughout the California body politic: Most public figures have been more or less unable to grasp the significance of this state’s largest minority group. They have been unable or unwilling to appreciate the needs and aspirations--and the importance--of the community that may some day constitute our majority, that in any case always will have been our “Founding Fathers.”

The location of many Latinos in barrios and rural areas tends to disguise the fact that this state is very Latino, and becoming more so every day. This isn’t meant to imply that there is some insidious Reconquista afoot, some attempt to steal back by demographics what was stolen in the first place. It is merely a statement of the fact that California faces a hard task of melding disparate cultures into a new political, economic and social entity.

California now is approximately 66% Anglo, 19% Latino, 8% black and 7% Asian. By the year 2030, an adult generation from now, it will be 38% Anglo, 38% Latino, 17% Asian and 7% Black. This is a profound shift with spectacular implications. Yet the dominant Anglo culture largely ignores this trend. Rather, it seems to anticipate a future California like the present--a middle-class kind of place where the Latino population has either been assimilated or lives somewhere down the road.

That mind-set is evident in this problem of the Los Angeles prison. The Administration seems to have been treating Latinos as something alien, something that can easily be pushed around. One can at least understand the Administration’s position from a pragmatic political point of view. For cultural and historical reasons, the Latino population is woefully under-active in state politics. It has tolerated powerlessness in a skewed economic structure, with the exception of the farm labor movement. Historically, it has existed as a submerged cultural current under the Anglo surface--living on the political and economic fringes, alienated from the power process, buffeted by the dominance and brusqueness of the Anglo majority. If any community was perceived as an easy target for the unpleasant business of housing a prison, it was the Latino community. But it was inevitable that their patience would erode. The L.A. prison controversy is a first sign that the attitude of a 20% minority will not be the attitude of a 40% minority.

Many believe that the former Crown Coach bus company site on the east side of downtown was picked primarily because the Administration thought it would be a pushover. Because the Latino community is perceived as weak and disorganized, state officials thought they could stick something there that would have drawn absolute outrage in any other urban (or suburban) area.

This time, however, they simply underestimated community response. The people of East Los Angeles stood up and demanded the same kind of consideration that would normally be granted to any other community: the right to participate in the decision-making process, and ultimately to reject the facility if it proved to be unsatisfactory to them.

This confrontation between a Latino community and a Republican Administration has far-reaching implications that are apparent to Senate Democratic leaders. It is true that Democrats were standing for a principle, the right of a community to be heard. It also is true that their position put a solution of the prison overcrowding problem temporarily on hold (though that is a long-time problem with a plan for relief already in place, and in no sense the kind of immediate crisis that rhetoric would indicate). But Senate Democrats perceived something else at stake: the allegiance of a minority that will swell to a substantial portion of the population in the next half-century. The time had come to accommodate a segment of society that has been for the most part ignored, thereby reaffirming its traditional Democratic affiliation.

The allegiance of the Latino minority to the Democratic Party is far from secure. In fact, many Latinos have shifted to Republicanism on the sheer appeal of Ronald Reagan and on the attraction of family-oriented principles that are consistent with the Latino cultural experience. But in this matter of the prison, the question of loyalty was called. Who would stand with the community? The Republicans or the Democrats? Now we know.

It’s easy to overstate the impact of the prison confrontation, but it seems that the Senate Democrats have made a choice of profound implications. It’s plausible to argue that Deukmejian made a tragic error of long-term consequence to the Republican Party.

In choosing to confront the Latino community, he sent a message that it was “business as usual” when Anglo necessity ran against Latino sensitivity. The immediate reaction was strong: a precipitous drop in Latino support for the governor’s reelection. The long-term result may very well be a reversal of the Latino drift toward Republicanism and a renewed commitment to the traditional party of preference. People remember who their friends are.

This may be of small significance now, with Latinos significantly under-registered in comparison to their Anglo counterparts.

But the Latino community will become politically more active as time goes by, galvanized in no small part by the kind of buffeting it took on the prison issue. And when a politically seasoned group reaches 40% of the population--at parity with the Anglo population--it is a force to be dealt with.

If the Republican Party continues its callous disregard for the feelings of the Latino voter, that force will be Democratic.

For all the heat and pressure that Senate Democrats took during the Great L.A. Prison Standoff of 1986, it may prove to be an investment that will deliver grand dividends. The battle involved more than prison sites, more than election-year posturing, more than a question of who was “tougher on crime.” It was a first shot in the long struggle for the future tidal wave of Latino voters. The governor may get his prison built, but it may prove to be a Republican Bastille.