Release of Medically Incapacitated Inmates Could Save California Taxpayers Hundreds of Millions in a Time of Budget Crisis

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Will the Board of Parole Hearings and the Schwarzenegger Administration Follow the Law?

By Ken Karan

Incarcerating people who are permanently medically incapacitated is a policy that produces no benefit to taxpayers at astronomical expense. The State of California is facing a 17 billion dollar budget deficit. Government officials must decide whether to continue diverting millions of dollars in public funds to incarcerate comatose or paralyzed inmates, or spend that money to hire teachers and police officers.

These choices are coming into focus as the results of three strikes laws, mandatory sentencing, and draconian anti-drug legislation, stoked by fear and political opportunism, become apparent. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2006 American prisons held more than 2 million persons in prison. The rate of incarceration in the United States is the highest in the world, and almost seven times higher than such politically repressive governments as China’s. Thirty years ago, California had 12 prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, the state has an inmate population of almost 175,000 inmates living in 34 prisons designed to hold no more than 81,000 men and women. The 2008 budget for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is over $10 billion with over $1 billion in health care costs alone.

The dysfunctional prison health care system has been under the control of a federal court since 2005. That same court ordered the state to develop plans to reduce overcrowding or face mandatory release of inmates. In January 2007, the Little Hoover Commission, a major State of California institution, issued a report that declared the prison system to be, “in a tailspin that threatens public safety and raises the risk of fiscal disaster.”

If the theory that incarcerating every offender would reduce crime was valid, one would expect to see a reduction in crime leading, at some point, to reduced costs of incarceration. Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. But, even as crime rates fell, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward spiral. The truth is that the promise that getting tough on crime would produce a dividend to society has failed spectacularly as California’s dysfunctional prison-industrial complex keeps growing its supply of inmates.

As citizens begin to realize that they are not getting what they are paying for, a movement to implement more rational policies is taking hold. One policy in particular, as part of the statute providing for recall of sentence, is known as “compassionate release.” The law recognizes circumstances in which decency calls for the release of inmates determined to have a terminal illness that will produce death within six months. With terminal illness as the only medical criteria for recall, however, other inmates were not considered even when they no longer had the physical ability to re-offend, such as persons who are comatose or paralyzed.