Don’t look now, but California is about to be forced to release some 27,000 prison inmates by 2012, with very little chance that many will have received any meaningful rehabilitation. Despite that the California Department of Corrections has been renamed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it’s still just a name on a door. The problems at the community level are even worse.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) June 28, 2008 — A proposed settlement seeting to reduce California’s prison population collapsed yesertday, setting the state for a trial that could result in the court-ordered release of thousands of inmates…
Local officials said that the proposed settlement would have put too great a burden on county jails and rehabilitation programs, which they sare are underfunded.
The California public has supported rehabilitation for years. One survey in 2004 found that by an 8 to 1 margin, Californians favored using state funds to rehabilitate prisoners both during and after incarceration. And yet, a report by the California Policy Research Center shows that while 42 percent of state inmates have a “high need” for alcohol treatment and 56 percent have a “high need” for drug treatment, only 7 percent get alcohol treatment and 9 percent get drug treatment — of any type, even just 12-step meetings — while in prison. The national average is more than twice that high. Not surprisingly, only 21% of California parolees successfully complete parole— half of the national average— and two out of three inmates returning to prison are parolees.
California has known about these problems for decades and done nothing. In fact, rehabilitation programs declined throughout the 1990s. Today, 20 percent of California inmates don’t take part in any prison program at all.
Pretty soon, there will be mass releases, and communities — not the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — will get hurt. Even if you don’t believe that addicts should be incarcerated, almost everybody thinks that they should receive treatment. If they don’t, if we release thousands of untreated alcoholics and drug addicts into our communities… well, let’s just say it probably won’t have a beneficial impact on public health and safety.
SAD FACTS ABOUT CALIFORNIA PRISONS
- 166,00 inmates in 33 prisons
- Design capacity of those prisons: 100,000
- Prisoners with substance abuse problems: 80 percent
- Prisoners with “serious need” who get professionally run treatment: 2.4 percent
- Released inmates returning to prison within three years: 66 percent
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