California prisons are reaching a breaking point. The state runs one of the biggest and most expensive prison systems in the world, spending $10 billion a year on corrections, more than twice what it spent just ten years ago.
Tough-on-crime laws and under funded prison rehabilitation programs have pushed the population to more than 170,000. Nearly all of the state’s 33 prisons are running at 200 percent capacity. Part of the problem is that many former prisoners don’t stay on the outside.
66 percent of them are sent back to prison within three years of being released.
Now, the state’s budget problems are threatening the few drug treatment and mental health programs that help prisoners transition back to society.
A new plan to close the state’s $23 billion budget gap includes a $1.2 billion cut to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and a proposal to slash the inmate population by 27,000.
Prison authorities are trying to avoid sending thousands of prisoners back onto the streets early by diverting these low-level offenders into community-based rehabilitation programs.
The proposal comes on the heels of funding cuts that put community rehabilitation programs in jeopardy.
A cut in funding could especially hurt the state’s 11,000 incarcerated women. They make up only six percent of the total population, but this group of prisoners may hold the key to fixing some of the system’s problems.
Nearly 90 percent of incarcerated women in California are non-violent offenders, and 80 percent have substance abuse problems. Many are single mothers whose children fall to the care of relatives or the foster care system.
Programs where women live with their children and receive drug and psychological treatment are rare, but the few that exist have shown promising results. Each person that doesn’t return to prison saves the state around $40,000 a year.
Expanding these programs could slice millions off of the prison budget and shrink the population… and the state’s incarcerated women might be the best place to start.