Has no one wondered why, no matter what the crime statistics or number of prison beds available, the prisons in California remain near 100% actual capacity, with the prisoncrats continually begging for more money and prison expansion at the expense of every other program in the state. That is the big secret--the how--the prisoncrats so closely and effectively control their total population numbers. A method that allows the prison industry to continually expand through preying upon the fears of the general public with threatened early releases of "dangerous" or "violent" criminals. 

First a little background: As the argument over the budget deficit continues, we hear a constant barrage of ideas from the various special interest groups on how to solve the fiscal problems without impacting their particular interest group. The lone standout, that to this day remains sacrosanct, is the California prison industry. And call it an industry because that is exactly what it has become: A growth industry unequaled by any but the nation's largest corporations. At the unofficial helm is the ultra powerful prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association ("CCPOA"), that doles out copious quantities of political cash, and has orchestrated the exponential expansion of their industry with little to no oversight. 

The prison population for the past two decades has remained at or near "200%" capacity, a very dubious number, a number that is creative statistics meant to mislead the uninformed. To explain, the California Department of Corrections ("CDC") bean counters consider only one person per cell as being 100% capacity. This is a paper game only, as all of the prison cells designed and built in the last two decades were for double occupancy. So when both bunks in the cell are occupied, the CDC propaganda artists will claim 200% overcrowding. The same is also true when filling both the upper and lower bunk beds in dormitory housing. This is just one well known example of creative statistics being used to obfuscate and confuse reality, and to bolster their early release scares which are actually demands for more money. In private industry we call these type tactics "cooking the books," and have recently prosecuted some company executives for fraud against their stockholders. 

In the mid to late 1990s, there was a government sanctioned investigation done by the Little Hoover Commission. Their report devoted a significant portion to exposing CDC abuses and inefficiency, and recommended changes. The Report included pages of official statistics leaving little doubt. Now why is this significant? Because an often raised issue in the budget deficit talks is the early release of prisoners to save money. Yet the solutions recommended in this renowned government study report remain ignored--no--actually buried. Why? It has been alleged that the CCPOA is so powerful that any solution that would undermine their expansion doctrine, or cut back on the wages or employment of their ever growing membership, is aggressively fought through their lobby and with large political financial contributions. Governor Davis vetoed legislation on March 18, 2003, that would have saved a projected $70 million through early releases. But early release proposals are just smoke and mirrors, and are used to play on public fears. The prisoncrats presently control their population numbers through guided manipulation of intake--not through releases, early or otherwise, as releases are fixed by law and not prone to manipulation. 

Now for the big secret--the how the CDC manipulates intake: The day-to-day prison population is controlled through the parole violation system. The parole officers are guided in manipulating the number of parolees that they violate and send back to prison on any given day. The Little Hoover Commission investigated this and called parole violators who had not committed any new crime, but become violated solely for running afoul of some technical aspect of their parole conditions, a "Technical Parole Violator." I no longer have the Report with the exact numbers available, but the stated numbers averaged somewhere around 30% of the entire prison population as consisting of Technical Parole Violators, and pointed out how a good deal of money could be saved by eliminating most of the non-substantial technical violations. These recommendations disappeared, as they would interfere with prison growth. 

So, as you can see, by tightening or loosening the technical violation criteria, or the intensity of enforcement at any given point in time, allows the prisoncrats to control their day-to-day population fluctuations. For instance, if at a given time the total prison population is a hypothetical 190,000. Then if 30% are technical violators, that is 57,000 inmates. That is a significant number of inmates with which to manipulate the total prison population, and this manipulation is also one of the contributors to the high recidivism rate in California, a rate higher than other states. If the percentage of technical violators drops to 25%, that is still 47,500 inmates out of 190,000 total. The manipulation process is a simple one, and generally unaccountable: Some prisoncrat unofficially notifies the parole division, "Hey, we have 200 empty beds today. Go get me some violators!" 

What is a technical violation? One example: A few years ago in Redding, California, there was an example of a particularly egregious Technical Parole Violation. A man on parole had a listed condition of parole of "No Police Contact." This is rather vague and subject to abuse and manipulation. It seems the parolee had driven his car to downtown Redding to go shopping, and had legally parked his car on the street. While the parolee was inside a store, another motorist lost control of his vehicle and crashed into parolee's unattended but legally parked vehicle. When the parolee returned to his vehicle he found the police investigating the accident, and approached them to inform them that the parked vehicle was his. Hence--Police Contact! His parole was subsequently violated. The parolee spent approximately six weeks incarcerated on this Technical Parole Violation, then finally some parole commissioner saw the absurdity of this situation and ordered him released. 

While this undoubtedly is an extreme example, unfortunately this sort of thing does happen more often than the prisoncrats want to admit. This extreme example does, however, illustrate the ease of abusing a system, and how easy it would be to control day-to-day prison population through such abuse. More common, however, is the parolee who simply drinks a beer, and with no other misdeed receives a Technical Parole Violation. Do the taxpayers really want to spend approximately $30,000 per year to reincarcerate someone whose only offense was drinking a beer? Proposition 36 sent the message the taxpayers do not want to do this for drug addicts, and drugs are presently illegal. How different are alcoholics who commit no new crime? 

The public has been instilled with a fear of prisoners being released early, while at the same time fiscal responsibilities demand some sort of change, leaving a political quandary. A partial solution was recommended by a government study years ago, it was obvious and simple, and requires only easy changes to the laws. The prisoncrats have been abusing the parole system for decades to control bed space and keep prisons full. Thus, the proposed solution to cut prison costs to the taxpayer advocated cutting back on Technical Parole Violations, or eliminating them. This would lower the total prison population, which would cut costs. The Legislature could do this through targeted funding cuts or law changes if they weren't terrified of the CCPOA. 

Manipulation of the Legislature by prison guards' unions is not without precedent. Prior to the enactment of the Uniformity in Sentencing Act, Senate Bill ("SB") 42, in 1977, commonly referred to as the Determinant Sentencing Law ("DSL"), the California parole system fit firmly under the normally accepted definition of the essence of parole, and that was early release. The parolee had an incentive to behave based on the threat of being returned to prison to complete his sentence should he misbehave. However, when the DSL first came into effect, there was no provision for parole. Lobbyists for the Probation and Parole Officers' Union, a group whose membership would have been put out of work with no parole law, convinced the Legislature to amend the Act and attach a parole period to all DSL sentences, a period that was not early release but instead a separate and distinct term of parole. 

California's resulting parole system is a hodgepodge of early release parole rules mixed with DSL after-thought rules, being derived more from interest in job security than public safety. It is ill conceived, ambiguous, and rife with abuse. In the early 1990s, when then Governor Pete Wilson was faced with massive budget deficits, the possibility of either totally eliminating parole, or of going  back to the traditional concept of parole as being early release rather than a distinct separate term, was floated through some proposed budget solution talks, only to be adamantly opposed by the CCPOA the union the parole officers now belong to. In the end, the Union convinced the Legislature to expand the parole program. 

The potential savings that could be realized from trimming the present parole program is astronomical. Take the hypothetical 57,000 Technical Parole Violators, multiplied by the $30,000 each to keep them in prison per year, and this amounts to a yearly total of $1.71 billion. That is close to the amount being cut from education this year in a Bill signed by Governor Davis on March 18, 2003. Additionally, education is a well known crime prevention and recidivism lowering tool, but so far, the California politicians' fear of the CCPOA has resulted in them choosing prisons over education. One could extrapolate forward and show how based on historical data, cutting education will increase the need for prisons. Have the taxpayers and Legislature considered this? The CCPOA has. 

Remember now, the present system of parole is not early release, but rather a distinct additional sentence that can return a parolee to prison, one who has committed no new crime, but based on the whims of parole officers and prisoncrats keeping prison beds fully occupied. The Little Hoover Commission Report five years ago showed how to save a large amount of money by cutting back or eliminating Technical Parole Violations. A savings amount that today is nearly equal to the proposed education cuts. 

What do the citizens of California want? Will they choose to close schools and expand prisons? 

Or, will they put a stop to the "wag the dog" hold the CCPOA has on the state government? 
 

Inmate Tom Watson