Building Minds Behind Bars

California’s prison system fails to protect the taxpayers whose dollars it gobbles. Its repeat-offense rate is among the nation’s highest. More than two-thirds of the state’s prisoners commit a new crime or violate their parole within a few years of release.

Connect this failure to studies showing that literacy programs, vocational training and academic skills help keep inmates from returning to crime, and Californians should wonder why the state prison education system has been all but dismantled. Virtually all vocational classes have been ended, and literacy training is offered to only a few thousand of more than 100,000 eligible inmates.

Next week, state legislators will consider a bill to reverse the losses. AB 1914, introduced last month by Assemblywoman Cindy Montanez (D-San Fernando), would give real clout to a 15-member prison education board that includes outsiders such as the chancellor of the California State University system. The board, now an advisory body, would allocate prison education funds and measure the effectiveness of programs.

The state legislative analyst estimates that it would cost only about $125,000 to set up the board under the Montanez bill. That would be a small price to reduce the $1.5-billion yearly cost of reincarcerating parolees who either commit new crimes or violate the conditions of their parole. Predictably, however, the state prison guards union sees the bill as intruding on its princely authority. Former Gov. Gray Davis, a chief recipient of the guards’ campaign contributions, vetoed a similar measure three times.

California’s new prison department director, former San Quentin Warden Jeannie Woodford, is a believer in the link between public safety and prison education. Her boss, Youth and Adult Correctional Agency head Roderick Q. Hickman, said the governor hired her last month because she was persuasive in explaining how “substance abuse, mental illness, lack of education and other factors ... drive criminality.”

She faces a long haul. The department’s latest prison education effort is laughable. Crafted in secret negotiations between the union and state officials last December, it ensured that guards would not face any new burdens, such as transporting inmates from cells to classrooms. Therefore, instructors “teach” from outside prisoners’ cell doors. Fixing this program would give Woodford and Hickman a good start. To make real progress, however, the Legislature and the governor need to give the prison education reformers better tools, including AB 1914.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has not stated a position on the Montanez bill. He may be tempted to leave reform strictly to Woodford. But sunshine helps reform. The governor should stand up to the guards union, as he has in the past, and support independent oversight of prison education.