3 Strikes and You’re Out of Room

How should we handle career criminals? Toss them in a cell and throw away the key. No more cells? Stack ‘em like cordwood. Dump ‘em in the desert inside an electric fence topped with concertina wire.

Who cares! Just get ‘em out of here.

We’ve all heard that bar talk and, I suspect, it’s the prevailing view of a fed-up, frightened citizenry. Regardless of how justified it might seem, however, courts frown on treating people--even vicious felons--like firewood or armadillos. They tend to let the bad guys back on the street.

So prison officials have been doing what they legally can--packing inmates into double bunks and carpeting their common day rooms and gymnasiums with sleeping cots.

“We’re basically double stacking people in prison, which is fine with me. I’d triple and quadruple stack them,” says Assemblyman Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga). “Unfortunately, I’m not a member of the federal judiciary.

“The best estimates are that sometime around April, 1998, we’ll have federal judges releasing inmates from California prisons.”

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Remember “three strikes and you’re out”? It roared through the Legislature like a runaway freight in 1994 and then, just to make sure, also went to the electorate and was embraced on a 72% vote.

Repeat felons now are getting locked up longer. The crime rate is falling and part of the credit goes to “three strikes.”

But “three strikes” also is double-stacking the prisons and threatening, many say, to bankrupt the state.

Some figures:

* The state prison population is roughly 135,000, a 150% increase in 10 years. By mid-2005, it’s projected to be 306,000, assuming sentences don’t get even tougher. That’s dreaming.

* After squeezing cots into every cranny, the prisons will run out of space with 177,000 inmates in mid-1998. That’s when judges are expected to begin opening the doors. The legislative analyst projects a need for 24 new prisons during the next 10 years at a cost of $7 billion. Even then, she says, the system will be “highly overcrowded.”

* It’s not that California hasn’t been building prisons. Since 1983, it has built 20 and now is operating 32. One more is about to open and another is under construction.

* Prisons are the fastest growing state program. Spending has increased by 800% since 1981. The Youth and Adult Corrections Agency is tentatively set for $4.1 billion in the next budget, 9% of the General Fund. Its percentage of the pie is projected to double within six years.

“The state of California just doesn’t have that kind of money,” asserts veteran Sen. Daniel E. Boatwright (D-Concord), chairman of a Senate prisons subcommittee. “We’ve got to look for other ways.”

Says Senate leader Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward): “I’m convinced we can provide for public safety without committing most of our growth in state revenues to one program--prisons.”

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The political planets seem to be in line for compromise. Virtually everyone at the Capitol agrees change is needed.

Lockyer has proposed locking up nonviolent felons in local jails and paying the counties for their trouble. But the counties don’t trust the state and the Senate leader now is less optimistic about this proposal.

One of the more intriguing concepts is privatization of prisons, both their construction and maintenance. Let somebody else do it cheaper and make a profit, an old Republican concept. Twenty-eight states do this, as does California with about 3,000 minimum-security prisoners.

Sen. John Lewis R. Lewis (R-Orange) is pushing legislation to allow private construction and operation of five prisons housing up to 10,000 inmates, including the most violent. The bill cleared the Senate Criminal Procedure Committee Tuesday on a unanimous vote, solidly backed by Democrats.

“We can’t afford to operate the Rolls-Royce prison system any more,” says Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman Richard G. Polanco of Los Angeles.

The political twist is this: Gov. Pete Wilson strongly supports privatization, but not necessarily for prisons. The prison guards union opposes privatization and has been by far the governor’s biggest political financier.

Meanwhile, Democrats normally oppose privatization, but don’t owe the guards much of anything. Saving money on prisons will mean more for their pet program, education.

Wilson and Republicans want the Legislature to place a $2.65-billion bond issue for prison construction on the November ballot. But they must deal with Democrats, because the bond measure will require a two-thirds vote of each house.

Leverage and linkage. That’s usually how politicians make policy change.