Prison Crisis: Will California Spend More on Jails Than Universities?

By Sasha Abramsky, In These Times. Posted October 23, 2007.

Halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco is Solano Correctional Facility, nestled against a series of rolling hills, on the outskirts of the small city of Vacaville.

From the prison's guard towers, the view is fairly beautiful: a Mediterranean-type vista of sun-browned grass and squat trees covering green hills, underneath the endlessly deep California sky. But from the windows of the dorms and cellblocks where the inmates live, all they can see is a slender patch of sky.

Inside some of the housing units at Solano, inmates take showers in rooms open to the entire dorm -- including guards, both male and female. As naked men soap themselves off, other inmates go about their business in front of them. Hundreds of men share a handful of toilets, as well as the mildew-and-mold-infested open shower area. "There's maybe 10 operable toilets for 200 guys. You come back from chow in the morning, you stand in line 10-to-20 minutes to use the toilet," says 47-year-old Michael Donoho, a heavily tattooed repeat offender (drugs, robbery, spousal abuse).

Meanwhile, two one-time gyms -- that in better days hosted boxing rings for prisoners -- have served as "temporary" dorms since the mid-'90s. Today they house more than 200 inmates apiece. Prisoners are stacked on row after row of triple bunks, with three feet of floor space separating one bunk frame from another. Nobody expects the gyms to return to their intended function anytime soon.

Safety is also an issue. The top bunks in the gyms are well over five feet off the ground and have no railings around them. It is, according to prisoners, fairly common for slumbering third-tier inmates to roll off their narrow metal beds onto the hard floor during the night.

But the sounds of sleeping men falling aren't the only noises heard after dark. During the long hours of the night, two correctional officers walk the floor and one more stands watch on a raised tier with a gun at the ready. Prisoner representatives from every race sit awake, perched atop their bunks, grimly scanning the walkways in case a rival from another race-based gang decides to launch a small-hours attack.

In the summer, large industrial-scale fans never stop whirring, and when the voices cease in the hours between lights-out at 10 p.m. and the 3 a.m. wake-up for inmate culinary workers, their whir eats its way into the mind. Add in all of the other sounds of a large, security-based institution, and you have the ingredients for mental chaos.

"The whole time I've been locked up, I've never gotten more than three hours of good, solid sleep," says a 46-year-old inmate who is serving a six-year sentence on methamphetamine charges. "Alarms going off, guys running around, cops yelling. It's been a real eye-opening experience."

When Solano opened in 1984, it was intended to hold 2,610 inmates. Twelve years later, five dormitory buildings were added to the original structure, boosting the prison's capacity by a thousand inmates. No additional buildings have been added in the past 11 years, yet the sprawling, gray concrete and razor-wire institution now holds 6,111 prisoners.

On paper, Solano has some of the best vocational training programs of any prison in California, with a metal shop that makes snowplow blades for the California Department of Transportation and a lens shop that manufactures almost all spectacle lenses for Medi-Cal -- the state's more expansive version of Medicaid -- and Medicare recipients statewide. The facility also routinely places soon-to-be-paroled workers in free-world jobs, such as in lens labs and opticians' offices, around the state. But on any given day, Solano has thousands of idle inmates because there aren't enough jobs, education slots and drug addiction treatment spots available for the surplus prisoners.

"We do the best with the resources and staff that we have," says Public Information Officer Lt. Tim Wamble, as he sits in his tidy second-floor office, its window overlooking one of the guard towers. "There's no way you can have 6,111 jobs or seats in classrooms. The rest go on waiting lists. Which means they're hanging out in the yard till something opens up for them."

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California's experiment in wholesale incarceration is one of the great policy failures of our times. Thirty years ago, California had 12 prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, after a generation of "tough-on-crime" legislation pushed through the legislature and the initiative process -- from three-strikes-and-you're-out to draconian anti-drug and anti-gang legislation -- the state has close to 175,000 inmates living in 34 prisons. That means almost one in every 200 California residents is now a prisoner of the state. (And these numbers don't even include the tens of thousands more prisoners in county jails.) The annual cost to taxpayers is about $10 billion per year, just shy of the amount the state annually puts into its vaunted public university system. If current spending trends continue, California will soon be spending more on prisons than on universities.

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Sasha Abramsky is the author, most recently, of American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment.

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