In One Area, California Still Leads the Country : Prisons: Our system is Gargantuan, yet hasn’t impacted crime. Now Wilson wants federal help to spend even more.

President Clinton should reject Gov. Pete Wilson’s request for $250 million to pay for the imprisonment of California’s undocumented residents. While at first blush the proposal may sound sensible, it has disturbing implications for the state--and the country.

California’s prison system is the largest in the nation, housing 109,000 prisoners in cells built for 57,000. In 1977, the system housed 19,000 prisoners, which means that in 16 years, California’s prison population increased nearly sixfold.

The hammer of incarceration falls much more frequently and heavily in California than it does nationwide and internationally. In fact, if California was a separate country, its incarceration rate (635 per 100,000 persons) would exceed the rate of the rest of the United States (455 per 100,000), South Africa (311 per 100,000) and the former Soviet Union’s 1989 rate (268 per 100,000).

When that hammer falls, however, it by no means falls equitably. Statewide, one in three African-American males in their 20s is under some form of criminal-justice control. African-Americans are 11 times as likely to be incarcerated as whites, while Latinos are twice as likely to be incarcerated as whites. That disparity will no doubt increase if the state is rewarded with $250 million to support the imprisonment of undocumented residents, the vast majority of whom will be Latino.

Since 1977, when a law went into effect in California reforming the state’s sentencing system and abolishing rehabilitation as a goal of imprisonment, reelection-minded legislators have passed more than 1,000 bills lengthening sentences. Since 1983, there have been more prison guards added to the state payroll than all other state employees combined.

And today, despite the largest prison-construction effort ever undertaken by any governmental entity, costing taxpayers more than $4 billion, California’s prisons are more crowded than they were in 1980, currently operating at 180% of capacity.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if we were locking up the real bad guys, or if our prison policies were reducing crime. But neither conclusion can be drawn from current data. The next entrant into the state’s prison system is nine times as likely to be either a nonviolent offender or technical parole violator as a violent offender.

California returns more technical violators (those violating a condition of parole, but not convicted of a new offense) to state prison than the other 49 states combined. During the massive prison expansion of the 1980s, California’s crime rate remained roughly steady, a trend experienced in other states that incarcerate a smaller percentage of their citizens.

The fact of the matter is, California does not deserve to be bailed out of its corrections mess by the federal government. When Wilson came to office, a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission presented him with 38 recommendations on how to control California’s mushrooming prison population. To date, the governor has ignored those recommendations and a host of others aimed at reining in the burgeoning costs of the state’s prisons. Instead, Wilson has steadfastly increased funding for prisons, something which he proposes to do again this year, while fighting for deep cuts in health, welfare and education.

If imprisoning more people were the simple answer to crime, as Wilson believes, California would be a drug- and crime-free utopia.

Having Washington subsidize the state’s failure to rationally address its prison problem would send a bad message to other states and exacerbate the disparity of a system already steeped in inequities.