Panel Calls Prison Policies Costly Failure

California’s correctional system -- the nation’s largest -- is a $5.2-billion-a-year failure that does little to prepare inmates for freedom and returns two out of three ex-convicts to prison before they complete parole, according to a report released Thursday by a state watchdog panel.

By neglecting to use prison time to educate and train most inmates for jobs on the outside, the Department of Corrections operates a “revolving door” system that all but assures parolees will resume a life of crime, the report by the Little Hoover Commission states.

A “singular focus on punishment guarantees that upon release most offenders will be as ill equipped to be productive, law-abiding citizens as the day they entered prison,” the report states.

Although the commission, legislators and scholars have criticized California’s correctional system, the new findings are expected to draw more attention because of the budget crisis and an incoming governor whose views on criminal justice remain largely unknown.

In the past, politicians have balked at prison and parole reforms that some critics call soft on criminals. Wary of such a reaction, commission members took pains Thursday to cast their recommendations as a way to make the streets safer and save money by thinning the prisoner ranks.

“In the long term, a better-performing correctional system would allow a greater share of the state’s resources to go to education and other high priorities,” said Stanley Zimmerman, a commissioner from Los Angeles.

Department of Corrections officials had few quibbles with the commission’s stark findings. The department’s chief of parole services acknowledged that current approaches fail to keep most ex-convicts from returning behind bars.

But while embracing the commission’s conclusions, officials also said they had already launched an overhaul of the parole system that will take effect Jan. 1 and includes many of the report’s proposals. Among other changes, they say, the state will strengthen programs for inmates on the cusp of release; expand and make mandatory programs that help parolees find jobs, housing, counseling and other services; and give parole agents more options when an ex-convict is found to be in violation of parole.

“We’re going to be smarter about sanctions [for parole violators] and we’re going to make sure that when an inmate leaves prison, he will know where he’ll be living and what resources are available to him,” said Rick Rimmer, who oversees parole and community services for the department. “It’s a new direction, and we expect it to lead to a safer California.”

Prison officials said they believe their new approach to parole, along with other policy changes approved in this year’s state budget, will reduce the incarcerated population by as many as 15,000 inmates -- or nearly 10% -- by June 2005. If that projection holds true, the decrease could save about $285 million and force the closure of at least one prison, perhaps the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.

More savings could come from reduced overtime costs as correctional officers would no longer need to cover additional shifts, a department spokesman said. Last year, the department spent $206 million on overtime pay for guards.

Each year, about 125,000 inmates are released from California’s 33 prisons. They are given $200 and placed on parole for three years, supervised by an agent who typically oversees about 80 ex-convicts.

While in prison, only about one-quarter of inmates have access to educational or vocational training programs, and most are on waiting lists for job assignments that allow them to earn a small wage and trim time off their sentences.

Upon release, more than 75% of parolees have drug and alcohol problems, half are illiterate, nearly 80% have no job, and 10% are homeless, the commission reports. The department offers a limited pre-release program to inmates at some prisons, but it is voluntary and no more than 30% of convicts take part.

“Sadly, and not surprisingly, the vast majority of parolees fail within 18 months” of their release, Zimmerman said. “So we send them back to prison, they sit there a few months, and then they’re released again -- still no better equipped for success than before.

“This cycle is repeated thousands of times every year, at staggering fiscal and staggering human costs.”

Nationally, one in three ex-felons winds up returning to prison before completing parole, the study said.

But in California, two out of three ex-convicts land back behind bars, either for parole violations or new crimes.

The costs of this constant churning are substantial. Incarcerating parole violators costs the state $900 million a year, the report said. An additional $660 million annually is spent to lock up parolees who commit new crimes.

The commission blames the constant recycling of offenders in part on California’s response to parole violators. Often, a parolee who violates the conditions of his parole -- by testing positive for drugs or missing an appointment with an agent, for example -- is returned to prison, “an expensive and temporary solution to a long-term problem,” the report said.

A better approach, the commission advised, would be the use of intermediate sanctions popular in other states, such as house arrest, electronic monitoring, substance abuse treatment, or incarceration at a halfway house.

Rimmer, the state parole chief, agreed, and said California parole agents would, beginning in January, have more tools with which to help and punish parole violators.

Around the state, the report’s findings and recommendations were praised by law enforcement officials and by Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, perhaps the most high-profile critic of the parole system.

Brown, mayor of a city where one of every 14 adult males is on parole or probation, called the correctional system an “abysmal failure” that produces parolees “who have a seventh-grade education and whose only skill set is stealing, selling drugs or committing general mayhem.”

The mayor said he would personally ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to “bring some sanity to all of this.... It needs to be at the top of his agenda, right after solving the budget crisis.”