Inmates exercise outside in the prison yard at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin on July 26, 2023.
Nearly two decades ago, a psychiatric expert making the rounds in a California prison witnessed something that would change the fate of the state’s criminal justice system forever.
A male inmate, unresponsive and in a catatonic state, was being held in a telephone booth-sized cell with no toilet. Guards had locked the man in there for the better part of 24 hours, and he was standing in a pool of his own urine when the expert spotted him.
When asked why the inmate was housed in such a condition, prison officials told the expert that the inmate was suicidal, and they had “no place to put him.” All mental health treatment beds were full, and the wait time for one to open up could be as long as 12 months.
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This incident proved to be a turning point in California’s approach to criminal justice, prompting massive reforms that have changed the way the state handles certain types of crimes.
If much of the current discourse surrounding crime and punishment in California is to be believed, it was progressives who leveraged this story and others like it to push for radical changes to the system that let criminals walk without punishment. The property crime, drug use and homelessness on our streets are a byproduct of this misguided compassion.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, it was Republican Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who latched onto the story of the suicidal inmate and used it to inform his majority decision in the case of Brown v. Plata. That ruling upheld a lower court decision that found that California’s prisons — which were designed for roughly 85,000 inmates but held over 170,000 at their peak — were unconstitutionally overcrowded. To mitigate those conditions, the court forced the state to reduce and cap its prison population to 137.5% of the system’s designed capacity — meaning that tens of thousands of inmates needed somewhere else to go.
The court’s ruling was no surprise. It came five years after Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 declaration of a state of emergency in California’s prisons, where the suicide rate was 80% higher than prisons nationwide at that time. A court-appointed expert found that 72% of those suicides were “foreseeable and/or preventable.” Inmates were dying because of a lack of mental health resources, and dangerous conditions were sending otherwise stable inmates into downward spirals. Guards, too, were suffering, and these out-of-control conditions were costing the state billions, with recidivism rates that were among the highest in the nation.
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In short, California’s criminal justice system was a dangerous and costly mess. And it was Republicans who demanded the state do something about it. With the conservative Kennedy as the deciding vote, the Supreme Court didn’t specify how California should lessen its prison population, just that it needed to.
In 2011, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown pushed a plan — colloquially called “realignment” — to comply with the court’s mandate. That plan, still in effect today, sent low-level offenders with nonserious, non-violent, and non-sexual convictions to county jail rather than prison. And it mandated that whenever these so-called “three nons” were released from a carceral setting, they would be supervised by county probation officers instead of state parole.
Jails are not the ideal setting for long-term, punitive sentences. Prisons are built for this purpose — with recreation yards, rehabilitation services and medical care like substance use disorder treatment. Jails have historically existed to temporarily house people awaiting trial. This population is more transient, and the services provided to them are accordingly sparser. It’s for these reasons that the jail-based substance abuse treatment that San Francisco is pushing toward is more difficult to administer than in other settings.
But a court order is a court order. And the hope was that realignment would not only lower the state prison population by shifting inmates to county jails, but that — stuck with the responsibility for actually dealing with the people arrested, instead of dumping them on the state — counties would look for more creative solutions to public safety.
Most did not. Five years after realignment, arrests of homeless people were up 31% in Los Angeles; 1 in 6 people arrested in the city that year were homeless. Unsurprisingly, the county jail system — already frightening — grew increasingly clogged and dangerous. [They remain so to this day. And L.A.’s homeless population has skyrocketed to over 46,000.]
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Meanwhile, evidence was gathering that inmates released under realignment were winding up homeless in large numbers.
Still, California didn’t actually come into compliance with the Supreme Court’s prison population cap until after the 2014 passage of Proposition 47, which eased sentences for simple drug possession and some property crimes. Though it was sold to voters under the rubric of curbing the excesses of the justice system, one could argue its true intent was as a tool to fulfil the court’s order.
It continues to serve that purpose to this day. As noted in a February report by California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s office, California’s state-owned prison system isn’t allowed to house more than 112,697 people. The system currently hovers around 95,000 inmates, which is well over its full capacity, but not in violation of the court order. Start dumping drug users and petty thieves back in there, however, and that space will fill up fast.
So, why does this history matter?
Because the criminal justice conversation in this state has become so unmoored from the realities that brought us to our current situation. In our endless arguments over compassion versus toughness on petty crime, Californians have forgotten how we wound up in the mess we’re in.
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Court restrictions on our prison population and the laws designed to get us into compliance with those restrictions mean we cannot meaningfully “get tough” in dealing with the kind of low-level quality-of-life crimes that are plaguing San Francisco and other California cities. Those who propose ending realignment and Prop. 47 as a solution might as well suggest dumping fairy dust on the Tenderloin. Those changes will mean nothing if the state doesn’t build more prisons, which it has no plans to do. As of January 2023, the state needs to spend $1.7 billion in infrastructure upgrades just to keep existing facilities from falling into disrepair.
Meanwhile, progressives who want to push further to undo the excesses of the criminal justice system have lost the plot as well. The evidence is ample that we are dangerously neglecting many of those granted leniency under our current reforms. More than 36,400 inmates have been released from California state prisons since 2019 without a fixed address, according to a report from NBC News, while 17% of people on parole reported being homeless. A recent CalMatters investigation found that a $100 million state program that aims to help roughly a quarter of paroled prisoners each year get back on their feet upon release isn’t working.
A compassionate desire to lessen sentences and pursue alternatives to incarceration isn’t going to build someone a place to live or a mental health treatment bed. And there is no justice in releasing inmates to a life of homelessness.
All roads lead to more infrastructure. Hopefully 2024 will be the year we stop the peacocking and do something about it.
Reach Matthew Fleischer: matt.fleischer@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @mattefleischer
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