Running Out of Room in the Lockups : Prisons: We’re adding 15,000 inmates a year; we need six new facilities without delay.

When the “three strikes” law was overwhelmingly approved last year, California made a strong commitment to putting career criminals and violent offenders away for a long time. The catch is that we have to have a place to put them.

The impact of “three strikes” and our overall effort to get tough on crime is already being felt. The California Department of Corrections projects that today’s prison population of 128,000 will grow to more than 210,000 by the year 2000--an increase of more than 15,000 inmates per year. As it stands, we can’t even come close to housing that many prisoners.

Nobody wants to coddle convicted felons. Corrections keeps its prisons austere. New facilities are designed to be efficient, to protect our communities from escapes and to be durable enough to last at least 50 years. They also must provide for the safety of the prison staff.

While national standards call for a goal of one prisoner per cell, 90% of the cells in our state system house two inmates. Overall, the state prison system is operating at 180% of design capacity--considerably higher than the level of overcrowding at Attica prison in New York when inmates rioted in protest of conditions. There is no way that California’s already overstretched facilities can take in thousands of additional prisoners each year without a serious commitment to new prison construction.

In the new state budget, more than $100 million was appropriated to fund the Department of Corrections’ “emergency bed program” to provide 6,000 dormitory beds in prefabricated buildings and space for another 14,000 beds by converting gymnasiums and other space into temporary dormitories until new prisons are built. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that the emergency has been resolved.

For the past several years, the Legislature has been wrestling with a request from the Department of Corrections for $1.8 billion for the construction of six new prisons and the purchase of nine additional sites for construction in future years. This is not a “wish list” but the minimum level of building that must be done to keep the lid on our prison system.

Working inside prisons is a tough and dangerous job even under the best of circumstances. New prisoners entering the system are increasingly violent and difficult to manage. As overcrowding increases, so does the potential for violence. The experience in California has shown that violence tends to rise dramatically when there is overcrowding.

Corrections administrators and correctional officers have worked together to almost double the capacity of our prison system and should be commended for their courage and flexibility in operating under these conditions. In view of the risk to their safety, it is not reasonable to ask our corrections people to do more without a serious commitment to building adequate new facilities.

Construction of our next six new prisons can wait no longer. Even these new facilities will fall far short of what we need. The state must continue to seek innovative ways to build new prisons faster and more cheaply, but it must continue to build unless we are willing to retreat and repeal “three strikes” and other tough laws that are successfully bringing down crime rates in California.

All of us would rather spend dollars on schools than prisons, but protecting the lives and property of citizens remains the first responsibility of government. Unless we can maintain order, everything else we value is out the window.