It is Better to have Fewer Prisoners

This responds to a letter by Michael Rushford, President of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. Michael Rushford predicts that releasing prisoners will cause crime to increase. True, some of the released prisoners may recidivate.

However, the fundamental issue regarding crime and punishment in America - particularly in California - is that we lock up far too many people: Our rate of incarceration is about 800 people per 100,000. This is by far the highest rate in the world. Other post-industrial countries - Canada, Japan, Europe - lock up between 35 and 120 people per 100,000. One tenth our rate!The relationship between crime and imprisonment is murky. It isn’t clear what is cause and what is effect. The primary cause of the sharp increase in crime during the 60s and 70s was demographic, not (just) permissiveness. Southern states (Texas, etc.) punish the most, yet they have the most crime. True, they may have to punish more because they have more crime, but this is only a small part of the reason for their exorbitant rates of incarceration.
One thing is certain: prisons make as much a contribution to crime as to its reduction. This is especially so in places like California, where a large majority of inmates consists of (1) non-violent (drug) offenders and (2) parole violators whose recidivism is often perfunctory (e.g. it consists of offenses like failing to notify their P.O. before traveling).

Reducing our prison population should have happened long ago, based on moral grounds and on plain common-sense. Now, the state’s disastrous deficit ($40 billion over the next 18 months) adds an even more compelling reason to do it. Every single service in the state is under the gun, from health and education to unemployment compensation and public safety. Yet, the Dept. of Corrections’ budget remains sacrosanct.
Not only that, but there is also the court-ordered additional $8 billion expenditure which prison czar Clark Kelso is demanding to improve the inmates’ medical treatment facilities. Most of this money would be for “medical space” for about 10,000 inmates. That’s $600,000 per inmate! Insanity is the only word I have, for a proposal to spend more than twice as much on one inmate as the cost of the average California house, while the state is already descending into bankruptcy without this additional extravagance!

Assuming that the authorities release the most low-risk inmates, California will be better off with fewer prisoners, whether this is done in order to reduce the deficit, or for humanitarian reasons.
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