Urgent Need for Parole Reform

About 28,000 people are locked up in California state prisons for parole violations: substance abuse, failure to show up or some other breaking of the rules. Thousands of these have no violent crime on their rap sheets.

Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles) had a bright idea. Rather than incarcerating all nonviolent parole offenders at a yearly cost of $21,000 each, why not test a little $1-million pilot program in which some receive alternative punishments, like having to perform closely monitored community service? Such a program could ultimately trim the $600 million in taxpayer money spent each year to imprison parole violators, and some of the savings could be used to beef up parole supervision.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday, in his first veto as governor, Gray Davis upheld the state’s current bloated system that puts parole violators back into cells and ensures plenty of jobs for prison guards. Davis said that the notion behind Wright’s bill was unproven and could “pose a danger to public safety.” He should know better.

The Wright bill would have strengthened supervision by, for instance, requiring parolees to wear electronic tracking bracelets or to report each day to parole offices they previously had to visit only once a month. Moreover, the bill would have required parolees to seek treatment for problems like drug abuse that might have led to the violation in the first place.

Similar systems in other states have resulted in fewer parole violations; California, with the highest rate of violations in the nation, certainly needs some fresh ideas. The bill was based on programs with established records of success in states like Oregon, Minnesota and North Carolina and on expert proposals like those of a blue-ribbon commission formed by then Gov. George Deukmejian and consisting of the state’s leading prison officials and district attorneys.

The only voice opposing the Wright bill has been the state’s powerful prison guards union, which contributed at least $2 million to Davis’ gubernatorial campaign and which receives jobs and raises based on prison populations.

Soon the Legislature is expected to send Davis two similar reform bills, by Sens. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) and John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), that would require the Corrections Department to study whether the state should employ sanctions other than prison for some nonviolent offenders. By signing both bills, Davis can prove that in taking the prison guards’ money he did not also chain himself to their parochial self-interest.