Prison Guards and Legal Reform

Lots of interesting posts lately about the CCPOA, its compensation, and its complicity in the crisis. Today’s post from Joshua Page addresses an important distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate aims of the union. Following Sara Mayeux’s point from yesterday (the system is broken and the CCPOA involvement is the outcome of that), he argues:

In a perfect world, taxpayers wouldn’t need to offer carrots to a public employee union to reform a state’s criminal justice system. But California politics, to put it mildly, is not quite a perfect world, and unless campaign financing and plenty of other structural matters are radically altered, the governor must get the CCPOA’s buy-in to downsize prisons.


Brown’s realignment proposal is projected to reduce the state prison population by upwards of 40,000. Although it would alleviate overcrowding and satisfy the federal courts, it would not necessarily shrink the overall correctional population (instead it would simply shift state prisoners to the counties). Truly shrinking the system still requires sentencing reform. Neither Brown nor the legislature has shown any willingness to shorten prison sentences or increase alternatives to imprisonment, but if they do take up serious sentencing reform, they will again have to deal with the CCPOA and its allies. By addressing union members’ fears, policymakers can soften their resistance. And while a smaller prison system will eventually lead to fewer officers (and union members), it will also benefit those who continue to toil on the tiers and on the yards.

Some of those fears are, of course, legitimate. Guards’ lives are in peril, their jobs are difficult to do, and given the size of our correctional monster, they provide an indispensable service dealing with a situation that is largely invisible to the public (save, of course, when it touches the public wallet in overt ways.) There is a golden mean between the approaches of Schwarzenegger and Brown in their dealings with CCPOA, and here’s hoping it can be found soon.

A First Look at Inmate Diet: The Nutrition and Violence Connection

CDCR’s regulations about inmate diets start off with a commitment to provide inmates with —

a healthy and nutritionally balanced diet, served in an orderly manner with food flavor, texture, temperature, appearance and palatability taken into consideration. Current Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA), and Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) as established by the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Science shall be considered authoritative in setting levels of nutritional need. Sanitation, safety, and food handling standards and practices shall be established and maintained in keeping with applicable requirements established by the Industrial Safety Standards (California Code of Regulations (CCR), Title 8) and the California Health and Safety Code (H&SC).

The standard menu for all institutions is a “heart healthy” low-salt, low-fat diet. All prison meals, save those served in camps, are pork free, and the regulations make allowances for vegetarian, Jewish, and recently added Muslim (“meat alternate”) meals.

This week, Emily Deans over at Evolutionary Psychiatry has posted links to several studies, conducted with double-blinds and control groups, which suggest that nutrition may play an important role in inmate violence reduction. Her first post cites two such studies, and her second post speaks of Gesch’s work in this field and his assessment that recommendations for vitamin supplements would not be heeded due to political reasons. I assume providing inmates with medication might be portrayed as “coddling” them and make for bad press, but maybe it should be considered as a public safety measure, considering its reductive effects on violence?

I’ve been trying to look at the Receivership’s organizational tree to figure out if anyone at the prison medical services did work concerned with preventative medicine, including dietary recommendations. Dear readers – if you can provide us with sample daily/weekly menus at CA institutions, or with stories on what friends or family members purchase at the canteen to supplement their meals, we’ll all know a bit more about prison nutrition.

——
props to Yossi Kikayon for bringing this to my attention.

A Balanced Look at Guard Compensation

Sara Mayeux of the Prison Law Blog posted a guest post on American Prospect about the Wall Street Journal story we recently covered. Some excerpts follow:

Do you know what “overtime” consists of when you are a prison guard? Hours and hours of your life! Spent inside a prison! Doing the soul-crushing labor of corraling other human beings! Instead of, you know, playing baseball with your kids, or whatever else you might want to be doing. Who wouldn’t give up late-night doc review and expense-account dim sum for that? Quelle luxe!


Look, the solution to the high cost of prison staff is to put fewer men and women in prison. If, however, a state is going to put itself into the business of the custodial care of hundreds of thousands of men and women, then it’s going to have to hire people to oversee them. And, you know what, it’s going to have to pay them semi-decently, and it’s also going to have to allow them vacation. So what if it’s seven weeks of vacation? So what if they retire at 55? Considering what Philip Zimbardo taught us that being a prison guard does to a person after even a day or two, I wouldn’t exactly call that a sweetheart deal.


It is, indeed, a problem that California legislators and voters have prioritized punitive criminal-justice policies at such great fiscal cost and, more importantly, at such great human cost. It is a problem that the political economy of California has rewarded the CCPOA so handsomely over the past 30 years for its advocacy of ever-more punitive sentencing laws. It is a problem that California has nearly 170,000 men and women in prison. The CCPOA did not c3reate those problems so much as it’s astutely exploited the system that made those problems possible.

While Mayeux’s critique of Finley’s comparison is, of course, justified, I think she’s cutting CCPOA a bit too much slack. Exploiting a problematic system is not a ticket out of responsibility; ask the many California unions who do not hold the state government hostage, and the many unions that do not have well-funded, deceptive puppet organizations supposedly advocating for victims. And while a system vulnerable to lobbying is not unique to prisons or to California, the war on crime (as opposed to the war on other social ills) has unique features and has had unique consequences as to the urban landscape and life choices of Californians.

I would like to hope that Finley’s critique was not aimed at individual prison guards. As Luke Whyte from Voices of Justice reminded us recently, working in corrections is not a piece of cake. And while this calls for a strong union and good work conditions (as per the recently passed contracts), none of this absolves the organization from its cynical exploitation of victim voices to push the government toward solutions that push as further toward mass incarceration. I would like to hear more from CCPOA about their support of a sentencing commission and about community-based solutions. They have a substantial share in the responsibility we all have for the current system and they have the power to be an important player in fixing it.

Jerry, Cut This

Just a few days ago we reported on Governor Brown’s decision not to build the new death row, commenting that abolition would save even more. Today, Death Penalty Focus is circulating a cost-centered petition to Governor Brown to abolish the death penalty.

Please read and sign. This is our chance to take this crisis and galvanize it into something positive.

More Information on CA Prison Guard Salary from the Wall Street Journal

A tongue-in-cheek Wall Street Journal op-ed compares the benefits of pursuing a Harvard degree and a career with CCPOA.

Training only takes four months, and upon graduating you can look forward to a job with great health, dental and vision benefits and a starting base salary between $45,288 and $65,364. By comparison, Harvard grads can expect to earn $49,897 fresh out of college and $124,759 after 20 years.


As a California prison guard, you can make six figures in overtime and bonuses alone. While Harvard-educated lawyers and consultants often have to work long hours with little recompense besides Chinese take-out, prison guards receive time-and-a-half whenever they work more than 40 hours a week. One sergeant with a base salary of $81,683 collected $114,334 in overtime and $8,648 in bonuses last year, and he’s not even the highest paid.

The comparison, of course, makes no sense in many other ways, but it does draw attention to the salaries, justified by the “toughest beat” rhetoric CCPOA has used for years.

Pricing the Correctional Free Lunch: Bill Facilitating County Jail Funding Passes Assembly

A new bill, AB94 (full text after amendments here), facilitating funding for county jails, was passed by the CA Assembly. Here’s the stated purpose of the bill:

Existing law authorizes the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), participating counties, and the State Public Works Board (SPWB) to acquire, design, and construct local jail facilities approved by the Corrections Standards Authority (CSA). Existing law authorizes the SPWB to issue revenue bonds, notes, or bond anticipation notes in specified amounts to finance the acquisition, design, or construction, and a reasonable construction reserve, of approved local jail facilities, as specified. Existing law requires a minimum of 25% in county matching funds for projects funded under these provisions and requires the CDCR and CSA to give funding preference to counties that assist the state in siting reentry facilities, as specified. AB 111 of the 2011–12 Regular Session, if it becomes operative, instead requires that the CDCR and the CSA give funding preference to counties that committed the largest percentage of inmates to state custody in relation to the total inmate population of CDCR in 2010.


This bill would, if AB 111 of the 2011–12 Regular Session becomes operative, authorize counties that have received a conditional award under one specified jail facilities financing program to relinquish that award and reapply for a conditional award under a separate financing program, as specified. The bill would lower to 10% the required county contribution and additionally require the CDCR and CSA to give funding preference to those counties that relinquish those specified local jail construction conditional awards and agree to continue to assist the state in siting reentry facilities, as specified. The bill would cap at $100,000,000 the amount a county may receive in proceeds from SPWB’s issuance of bonds, notes, or bond anticipation notes under those specified provisions.


This bill would appropriate $1,000 from the General Fund to the CDCR for purposes of state operations to be used by the CSA in the 2011–12 fiscal year.


This bill would declare that it is to take effect immediately as an urgency statute and a bill providing for appropriations related to the Budget Bill.

From a humonetarian perspective, this bill essentially addresses the “correctional free lunch” problem identified by Zimring and Hawkings in The Scale of Imprisonment:

The parable of the free lunch is relevant to the discussion of prison population because prisons in the United States are. . . paid for at the state level of government out of state correctional budgets, but prison populations are determined by the number of prisoners referred by local officials and the length of sentences imposed at the local level. Since localities do not contribute to central state correctional budgets, the marginal cost of an extra prisoner may be zero at the local level of government, where the decision to confine is made.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s reform shifted the incarceration for several offenses from state prisons to county jails in order to address overcrowding at the state level. This change was heavily criticized by conservative lawmakers for endangering public safety, and opposed by local jail authorities arguing that there was overcrowding at the lower level, too. The new bill would supposedly allow localities to build jails more easily by fronting less money from the county budget before receiving state assistance. On one hand, this indicates fiscal commitment to the welcome trend of shifting population from distant facilities to their communities. On the other hand, this may be another initiative in the “if you build it, they will come” vein, which does not bode well for a decrease in prison population at any level. Also, note that this compounds the correctional free lunch issue: Facilities are built by the locality, but the state assumes more fiscal responsibility for them in the initial stages. Let’s stay tuned on this one.