That’s the predicament facing Susanville, a small town that is the seat of Lassen County in northeast California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is righteously trying to close prisons, a historical reversal and acknowledgment that the state has incarcerated too many people for too long. But it is wrongfully targeting one of Susanville’s two state prisons, the California Correctional Center (CCC), for closure later this year. Shutting down CCC would reduce the town’s population, cost jobs, and weaken the town’s economy and healthcare infrastructure.

And state officials don’t seem much to care.

There is no discernible plan for mitigating impacts on the community. They have yet to offer a full accounting of the reasons for their decision, which came with little warning or justification. Indeed, before the state’s announcement last year of its intent to close CCC, the Susanville facility had not shown up on lists of California prisons that should close, whether compiled inside or outside of government.

In the absence of public explanation, it’s fair to wonder about the real motives behind the attempted closure. California’s rush to construct prisons in previous generations was driven by politics, not careful consideration of human impacts. Will the state, in moving to close prisons, repeat that same mistake?

What’s most puzzling about the decision is that there is an obvious alternative prison for closure: the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, in Riverside County. The Norco facility has been in such disrepair—reports have cited cockroaches, rodents, poor drinking water, terrible bathrooms, and dangerous electrical systems—that Gov. Jerry Brown tried to shut it down a decade ago. In 2016, it appeared all but certain to close, but the state gave it a reprieve in order to have the flexibility to stay below a complicated cap on populations in some facilities.

Even if Norco can’t be closed, there are other, better places to shut down than Susanville’s CCC.

Last year, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a coalition of groups working on criminal justice reform, put out a list of 10 prisons the state should close, based on five criteria (health conditions, overcrowding, costs, location, and homicide-suicide rates) and surveys of formerly incarcerated people and their families.

Norco was on the list. So was the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, California State Prison Los Angeles County, and five prisons in the San Joaquin Valley (Avenal State Prison in Kings County, California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, and Kern Valley State Prison and North Kern State Prison in Delano).

CURB has welcomed the attempt to close the Susanville prison, noting that its remote location makes it hard for families to visit. (The report also suggests closing all 34 state prisons if possible). But the coalition has criticized the Newsom administration’s process for prison closings as arbitrary and confusing.

That’s an understatement. And the way Susanville is being closed has the potential to undermine the movement away from mass incarceration. The state needs to think about local context, and not just the prison system itself.

Compare the likely impacts of closing Norco’s facility versus closing Susanville’s. Shutting down Norco would likely be an economic boon, officials there have said; the prison site is in a busy part of the Interstate 15 corridor in Riverside County and could be redeveloped as a hotel, or for other business purposes. But in Susanville, geographically isolated in far northeast California, any closure would do real damage.

Correctional officers at the closed prison won’t lose their jobs, but they will be reassigned elsewhere, likely forcing their families to move. And that’s a body blow in a place like Susanville, both economically—officers are well-paid—and because it’s a community in which officers are leaders in civic organizations. Prisoners represent a significant portion of Susanville’s population, more than 6,000 of the town’s 16,000 people; losing one of the prisons means losing funding tied to population. And the town’s healthcare infrastructure, including its hospital, depends in part on serving the people who live and work at the prison.

But such local realities are taking a backseat to politics in this decision. Norco is in the populous and economically growing Inland Empire—a competitive region where Democrats have been making gains—while Susanville is small and on the wrong side of California’s political divide. Lassen County had the highest vote share in the state both for President Trump’s re-election, and in favor of the failed 2021 recall of Gavin Newsom.

Of course, the location of prisons has always been a political issue, with many communities preferring not to host. Lassen, which very much wants to keep the CCC in operation, knows this, and its leaders have emphasized the community’s devotion to its prisons.

In one extended community meeting on the Susanville courthouse steps that I attended last year, State Sen. Brian Dahle, a former Lassen County supervisor, talked emotionally and practically—in ways that did not satisfy the angry crowd—about how Susanville might convince Gov. Gavin Newsom to negotiate with the town, and to close a different prison instead.

“Let’s think like Democrats,” one local community leader declared as they strategized.

But it’s not clear if negotiated settlement is possible. Susanville has taken the fight to court, challenging the shutdown on the grounds that it violates the California Environmental Quality Act. The announced date for deactivating the prison is June 30, 2022, but the legal fight may extend beyond that.

And there is a new political dimension. Dahle, the state senator, has announced his candidacy for governor, and one of the pillars of his platform is public safety. With higher profile Republicans skipping the race, he is considered the leading GOP candidate. If he makes it through June’s first round election, as seems likely, the debate about prison closures, in Susanville and elsewhere, could soon become a statewide issue.

The post California Is Closing the Wrong Prison appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I glimpsed one answer to that question while driving to Deuel Vocational Institution, between the San Joaquin County cities of Tracy and Manteca. The demise of Deuel, which shuts at the end of September, is more than just the first closure of a state-owned prison in a generation. It also opens a prison window on the future of our landscapes, and on the peculiar predations of California progress.

Heeding my phone’s directions from Oakland, I exited I-205 at Tracy and followed Grant Line Road out to the prison. En route to that human warehouse, I had to navigate a thoroughfare lined with another breed of warehouses: massive logistics facilities for our nation’s retailers.

On Grant Line, I encountered two Amazon warehouses big enough to blot out the sun, distribution centers for Home Depot and US Foods, and huge facilities labeled with the names of third-party logistics companies NFI and APL. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had a major regional distribution warehouse there, too. And very near the prison stood the largest of all the warehouses, still under construction (its eventual occupant undisclosed), appearing twice as tall as all the others.

By the time the road forked right and I could see my destination, the 68-year-old prison seemed small.

This juxtaposition of older prison and newer logistics facility is not just about zoning and geography. It’s a changing of the guard, and of the guards. Just as that Old Testament prophet Isaiah foresaw the beating of the swords of war into ploughshares for agricultural cultivation, 21st-century California realities point to a new prophecy:

Out with the mass incarceration, in with the mass commerce.

Two different trends, both accelerated by the pandemic, are working together here. The first is California’s rapidly declining prison population—reduced to less than 100,000 in recent years by court rulings, sentencing reforms, and early inmate releases to limit COVID’s spread. As a result, the state has been ending contracts with private prisons and moving to close some of its older state-owned prisons.

The second trend is the surge in internet commerce, which has produced a surge in warehouse construction on the cheaper land in edge cities and along rural highway corridors where many of our prisons were built.

In recent months, as I’ve driven to California prisons that are targets for possible closure, I often find myself struggling to locate the correctional facility among seas of logistics facilities. A typical example is the state prison most in need of closure—the criminally expensive-to-maintain California Rehabilitation Center—which is hidden behind an ever-growing swarm of warehouses off I-15 in Norco, in Riverside County.

But the intersection of prison and warehouse involves people, not just land.

Prisons disproportionately house poorer and non-white Californians—the same people that warehouses disproportionately employ. Indeed, new warehouses are often the rare places open to hiring people with criminal records—and more so in recent years, with progressive attitudes toward ex-offenders coinciding with a growing shortage of labor.

But there is a dark side to warehouse employment: working inside these facilities can feel like prison. Employees are under intense surveillance and monitoring. They can be punished or fired for taking time away from work—even for rest breaks or to go to the bathroom.

So, state lawmakers, who in previous years wrestled with conditions inside prisons, are turning to the question of how to make warehouses feel less like prisons.

Earlier this month, the California legislature approved AB 701, a bill with first-in-the-nation regulations of warehouses. If signed into law by the governor, the bill would require disclosure of how companies surveil and monitor their employees.

Warehouses would have to disclose the quotas and algorithm-based metrics on work speed they use to judge workers. Companies could no longer penalize their workers for “time off tasks,” including going to the bathroom. The bill also requires the state to adopt new regulations to help reduce the high rates of on-the-job injuries in these warehouses.

Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s sponsor, has expressed particular concern about an Amazon warehouse being built in Otay Mesa, on the east side of her San Diego-area district. That facility, and similar warehouses, will neighbor existing correctional facilities, including a notorious immigration detention center (which the ACLU is trying to close), and the Richard J. Donovan Correction Facility, the only state prison in San Diego County.

Back in Tracy, on my drive down Grant Line Road, I tried to enter a couple warehouse facilities to talk to workers, but the places were too well-guarded. Accessing the closing prison was far easier. The old guard house, where visiting cars have to stop, was empty. And the entrance gate of the prison itself was wide open, with the inmates having already been relocated. After looking around the property, I helped staff carry out some computers for re-use by probation officials.

Standing there, it was not hard to imagine this old prison site—and those of the other 11 state-owned prisons that are at least a half-century old—being repurposed for warehouses.

It became even easier after I drove 25 minutes up to Stockton, where the last state prison closed in 2003, the Northern California Women’s Facility. But I couldn’t find the site. Its former address lies amid distribution centers and a massive intermodal facility for logistics, where cargo is switched from trucks to railcars (or vice versa) on its way from warehouse to warehouse.

The post Out With Mass Incarceration and in With Mass Commerce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the conclusion of a leading researcher on California prisons, UC Berkeley public policy professor Steven Raphael, at a Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event “Has California Ended Mass Incarceration?” co-presented with UC Center Sacramento.

“We can objectively say no, just by the numbers,” Raphael said when moderator Abbie VanSickle, the California reporter for The Marshall Project, directly posed the title question to him during the conversation. While the incarceration rate has fallen from 488 people per 100,000 in 2006 to 310 people per 100,000 today, Raphael said, that rate is still three times higher than the 100 per 100,000 rate the state saw in the 1970s. “We still have a lot of people incarcerated,” he added.

The event, which went far beyond statistics, dove into California’s history service of incarceration in service of understanding the major changes we’re seeing in the state’s prisons, jails, and parole and probation systems today.

Raphael noted that prison overcrowding has been a problem since the state’s founding in 1850, and the construction of San Quentin two years later. But the late 20th century stands out as an inflection point in that history. From about 24,000 people in state prisons before 1980, a wave of sentencing changes and tough-on-crime measures significantly increased the state’s incarcerated population. By 2006, when the state prison population peaked, there were about 175,000 people in prison Raphael said. (The number of people on parole, probation, and in county jails, which hold those awaiting trial or serving shorter sentences, also increased, he noted.)

In response to VanSickle’s question—whether this huge rise in incarceration was intentional—Raphael made two points.

First, he noted that sentencing reforms in the 1970s were motivated by concerns similar to those of today’s criminal justice reformers—that the system produced unequal, unfair, or racially discriminatory results. But that earlier wave of reform—replacing the “indeterminate” sentencing with the seemingly fairer rules of “determinate” sentencing—had unintended consequences, as the system lost the ability to treat individuals differently, based on their rehabilitation work. When tough-on-crime laws and ballot measures arrived in the 1980s, there was no way to slow the explosion of incarceration, and more people went to state prison for longer periods of time.

Raphael said that California made small reforms after 2006 to try to reduce the prison population, and improve the poor quality of medical and mental healthcare in the system. But it took a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision—which ordered California to reduce its prison population, then at nearly twice its capacity, to 137.5 percent of capacity—to begin the current era of reform.

That order, Raphael explained, led to a decade of criminal justice overhauls by legislators and voters.

A 2011 law, AB 109, commonly referred to as “realignment,” diverted non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual offenders who previously went to state prisons into county jail, probation, or diversion programs. AB 109 produced a 30,000-person decline in the prison population in less than a year, and reduced weekly admission from 2,000 a week to 500 a week, Raphael said.

Further change, and further prison population reductions, were driven by voter-approved measures—2012’s Proposition 36, which changed the state’s “three strikes” law; 2014’s Proposition 47, which redefined as misdemeanors some offenses charged as felonies, leading to a drop in re-arrests of prisoners; and 2016’s Prop 57, which added more flexibility to sentencing. He said that 2017 and 2019 laws to eliminate some sentencing enhancements also made a difference.

Throughout the conversation, VanSickle pressed Raphael to talk about the impacts of these changes—such as the rise in county jail populations that coincided with the decrease in prison populations. One of the most intriguing impacts, Raphael argued, has been on racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Raphael said he and his research colleagues found that a narrowing in racial disparities among felony drug arrests occurred “almost instantly” after the enactment of Prop 47’s provisions turning some felonies into misdemeanors. In particular, the professor said, “you see this stunning shift in the felony drug arrest rates for African American men, to the point where it’s below the rate for white men before Prop 47 went into effect.”

“Most of these reforms were not enacted with racial disparities in mind—they were enacted to be fairer, to moderate, to not have such stiff sanctions, and under pressure of the federal court,” he said. But in looking at numbers on race and rates of incarceration, re-arrest for prisoners, and pre-trial detention of arrestees, “all these disparities narrowed.” That’s because “the criminal justice system generally has a disproportionate impact on the African American population, and to a much lesser degree, the Latino population … Moderating those sentencing practices certainly doesn’t eliminate, but tends to narrow, disparities in the outcomes we see,” he explained.

In response to questions both from VanSickle and audience members in the YouTube chat room, Raphael debunked claims, often aired in media or by politicians, that prison reform has produced a big rise in crime. There has been no measurable increase in violent crime tracked by the FBI, and research suggests only a small effect on auto theft, he said.

“Overall, we don’t see a big impact on reported crimes despite the fact that we have much fewer people incarcerated,” Raphael said.

Throughout the talk, Raphael emphasized how much is not understood about the full effects of specific reforms now being considered and discussed—from eliminating cash bail to restorative justice to alternative courts that focus on drugs, behavioral health, or charges involving veterans or young people.

He also cautioned that changes in incarceration aren’t driven just by changes in the law. He pointed to a “remarkable pattern being observed across the country”: a recent, sharp decline in the number of arrests of young people, ages 18 to 25, which is also reducing the flow of young people into jails and prisons.

What explains the decline? Research points to varied explanations, said Raphael, from higher education levels to young people spending more time online and playing more video games. “Young people for whatever reason are not getting into as much trouble today as they did in the past,” he said. “If that were to continue into the future, that alone would moderate prison populations in the United States.”

During an audience Q-and-A session, Raphael addressed questions about plans to close California prisons (any closures need to be preceded by more sentencing reforms), about the role of “progressive” prosecutors in reducing incarceration (look to the vast differences in incarceration rates among California’s 58 counties, each with its own district attorney), and about changes in terminology around prisons (some are now calling the “criminal justice system” the “criminal legal system”).

In response to multiple questions, VanSickle and Raphael also spoke about the impact of COVID on incarcerated individuals, including an outbreak at San Quentin last year. In March 2020, Raphael noted, there were about 124,000 people in the prison system. That number has now dropped to 94,000 because of the accelerated release of some vulnerable prisoners, and reductions in transfers to prisons from county jail. But Raphael said he suspects that drop is temporary and that the population will go back up when the pandemic recedes.

In closing, Raphael noted that while California has brought down its incarceration rate, it still incarcerates people at a significantly higher rate than other states—notably New York, Washington, and Massachusetts—and other nations.

“We’re not a European country yet,” he said.

The post Even After a Decade of Reforms, California’s Era of Mass Incarceration Is Far From Over appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.