The State Worker
Gavin Newsom wants to close a California state prison. It won’t be easy
Gov. Gavin Newsom is talking about an idea that has hung around California for more than 150 years: closing a state prison.
Newsom brought up the idea at a meeting earlier this month with The Fresno Bee editorial board as part of a broader conversation on criminal justice reform.
“I would like to see, in my lifetime and hopefully my tenure, that we shut down a state prison,” he said. “But you can’t do that flippantly. And you can’t do that without the support of the unions, support of these communities, the staff, and that requires an alternative that can meet everyone’s needs and desires.”
Closing a state prison is one of the few ways to truly save a lot of money in California’s correctional system, which has a budget of $15.8 billion this year, experts said. A closure also would represent a step toward rehabilitation and away from incarceration in the state’s criminal justice system, since it likely would involve releasing some low-risk inmates.
But, as Newsom underscored with his choice of words to the editorial board, it’s difficult.
California’s correctional system has been under the supervision of a federal court since 2009, when a three-judge panel ordered it to reduce severe overcrowding.
The prisons are still above capacity, and moving some inmates to county jails has created its own set of problems for local governments. The correctional officers’ union, representing about 28,000 officers, is a powerful political force. And in many communities, prisons are critical to the local economy.
The prison that California lawmakers have most often talked about closing is the state’s oldest: San Quentin, built on 275 acres on San Francisco Bay’s north shore in 1852.
Legislators first suggested shutting down San Quentin in 1857, when it was consuming a large chunk of the state budget, according to an academic paper published three years ago by W. David Ball, an associate professor at Santa Clara University Law School.
More recently, finances drove multiple proposals to close the prison during the recessions of 2001 and 2008. At least four bills failed to clear the Legislature in the four years leading up to 2009. Lawmakers have suggested San Quentin’s real estate could sell for $1 billion to $2 billion.
Newsom didn’t mention finances. He was talking about making the state better at rehabilitating inmates and preparing them for life outside prison. He said the subject has become personal to him during the 10 to 20 hours per week he and his staff spend on decisions to release inmates on parole.
“There were people that were going out that have no resources, no support, no capacity for us to know that they’ll ever do well,” he said. “That they’ll end up on the streets and the sidewalks, that they’ll end up as a statistic.”
In that context, San Quentin isn’t the obvious choice to close. It has some of the state’s best rehabilitation programs, thanks largely to its proximity to a major city with people who can provide special services. Most of the state’s 35 prisons are located in remote areas.
Newsom didn’t say which prison he might be thinking about. Neither did his office in an email this week.
“The governor will release more details for a broad criminal justice agenda in his January budget proposal,” spokeswoman Vicky Waters said.
California Rehabilitation Center
A more likely target for Newsom could be the California Rehabilitation Center, a former military barracks in Riverside County, said Matt Cate, a former California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation secretary who is now a consultant.
The dilapidated facility houses 2,900 medium-security inmates.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation evaluated closing the facility, according to a 2016 report, but determined new cells would be needed to accommodate inmates and stay under the court’s population limit of 137.5 percent of the corrections system’s total capacity.
As of Nov. 20, the state’s prisons and camps stood at 131.3 percent of capacity, with about 117,700 inmates, according to the latest data from the department.
As part of the state’s solution to overcrowding, it is locating some lower-security inmates in county jails. While Newsom said counties would play a role in closing a state prison, there isn’t much more capacity in the jails, Cate said.
Newsom also mentioned so-called step-down facilities that aim to re-integrate inmates into their home communities 12 to 14 months ahead of their release dates.
The programs place inmates in lower-security housing with ankle bracelets and supervision from parole and correctional agents. During the step-down period inmates have access to substance abuse treatment, therapy, health care, help finding a job and other services to help them gain self-reliance.
Cate suggested the dorms at the California Rehabilitation Center could be updated and used for step-down programs, especially for inmates settling in the Inland Empire area.
“I’d be more interested in having inmates be in their home communities in step-down facilities than in jails,” Cate said.
Cost savings
Most of a prison’s costs are for personnel, said W. David Ball, the Santa Clara University Law School assistant professor.
Adding or removing an inmate or a number of inmates doesn’t dramatically change a facility’s costs, since they have to pay staff to maintain the whole operation.
“Closing an entire facility is really the only way to save money,” he said.
California has reduced its inmate population by 30,000 over the last decade, which should reduce its dependence on prisons, Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, said in an email.
As the population has decreased, the corrections department’s spending has increased. Its $15.8 billion budget for fiscal year 2019-2020, covering about 57,700 staff positions, is up from $8.2 billion in 2009-2010, when the department had about 65,000 positions and 150,000 inmates. The corrections budget includes about $12.8 billion from the state general fund, and about $3 billion from other accounts for local programs.
Ting said the state’s spending on corrections, which is greater than the $8.4 billion per year the state spends on the University of California and California State University, is “ridiculous and makes no sense.”
“Closing a state prison should be on the table,” as part of a broader solution including rehabilitative grants and other measures, he said.
California Rehabilitation Center employs about 1,100 people and has 114 vacancies, according to CDCR data. While they work a lot of overtime, reducing the staffing there would require layoffs, relocating workers and/or reducing their numbers through attrition.
Even when California was reducing its prison population and corrections budget during the realignment process under the court order, it didn’t lay off correctional officers, reducing the workforce instead through attrition, Cate said.
Ball said closing a state prison would be a welcome reversal from the state’s prison-building spree of the 80s and 90s, when it built 21 new prisons.
But to truly address California’s prison population, the state needs to keep people from ever going there, he said, through early childhood education, support for parents, better mental health care and housing support.
Cate said that while a goal of closing a prison is ambitious for Newsom’s tenure, it might be possible over two terms.
“By the end of his second, I think it could be done and I think it’s something he could rightly be proud of,” he said.
This story was updated at 4:55 p.m. on Nov. 25, 2019 to correct the amount of money the state spends on the University of California and California State University.
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