Ask Hard Questions

Sens. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) and Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) plan to do something today that is unheard of in California: demand that leaders of the state’s prison and parole system explain why California has a higher proportion of parolees who end up back behind bars than any other state. They’ll ask how this can happen despite a massive prison building boom and a twelvefold corrections budget increase since 1980.

The hearings are so rare because the state’s powerful prison guards union has vowed to spend millions of dollars defeating any politician who questions the status quo it has enforced on the system for decades. Former Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature were far too quick to give the guards a 37.2% pay raise over three years when other state employees got almost nothing. Speier and Romero can distinguish themselves simply by refusing to be cowed by the guards union and its bald political threats.

They should start with California’s parolee failure rate of more than twice the national average. They should link that statistic to state officials’ termination of community- and prison-based educational, job and counseling programs that in other states keep inmates from returning to prison. The corrections department recently closed its last meager job-training programs and put remaining teachers in an impossible position: Many, working from the hallways of temporary lockups, are compelled to shout lectures about moral responsibility through meal tray slots in metal cell doors. “It’s pretty nuts,” said Andy Hsia-Coron, a teachers union leader. “You’re not going to get any teaching done standing by a cell door.”

Roderick Q. Hickman, secretary of the state Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, should also be pressed to explain why his department recently reclassified thousands of low-risk inmates as high risk, a shift that is the basis for insisting that California taxpayers spend $700 million to build Delano II, a maximum security prison in the Central Valley that will cost more than $110 million annually to operate. And why the prison inspector general’s budget was slashed from $9 million to $2.7 million in the last year alone, despite recent private prison riots and allegations of prison guard brutality and coverups that cry out for investigation.

It’s an outrage that such questions as these weren’t asked decades ago, when state prisons started to become revolving doors of crime. Romero and Speier should not shrink from asking them today.