Rising prison costs may hinder governor's revamp plans

When he took office just over a year ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom pledged to continue Gov. Jerry Brown's work in reducing California's prison population.

Newsom then gave himself another tool to do just that, signing a bill to create the newly-formed Committee on Revision of the Penal Code. He recently made four high-profile appointments to the committee, whose mission is "rationalizing the substance of criminal law."

That mission became a little more pressing last week when the Legislative Analyst's Office reported prison costs have continued to rise even though the state's prison population has fallen. The report showed spending on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation grew from $9.7 billion during the 2010-11 fiscal year, when Brown took office, to $13.3 billion during the current 2019-2020 fiscal year.

This $3.6 billion growth occurred despite the number of prisoners dropping 23% between 2011 and 2019, from about 162,400 to 125,500. The number of people on parole dropped even more sharply, from 90,800 to 50,800.

The reduced prison population "allowed the state to avoid significantly higher costs," the report noted, though the authors declined to specify by how much. The new spending that did occur was largely unavoidable and driven by three factors: compliance with court orders, increased employee compensation, and costs that were deferred during the state's fiscal crisis several years ago.

One well-known issue in California's prisons contributed to all three factors: mental health care.

This topic is of particular interest to the committee's chairman, Michael Romano. Romano is the director and founder of the Three Strikes and Justice Advocacy Projects at Stanford Law School, which have focused much of their work on investigating how people with mental illness often end up in longterm incarceration.

"We're directed to study and make recommendations that would simplify and clarify the Penal Code, paying particular attention to alternatives to incarceration, parole, reentry, and recidivism. This is a long term project," Romano said in a phone interview Friday.

He said he is serving on a four-year appointment and the committee does not have a sunset date.

The committee is planning to meet every other month, with some meetings likely to take place outside Sacramento, and deliver a set of recommendations next January, Romano said.

He led the first meeting Jan. 24 at the Capitol. Three of Newsom's more recent appointments were in attendance: former state Supreme Court Justice Carlos R. Moreno; Peter Espinoza, director of the Office of Diversion and Reentry at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services; and L. Song Richardson, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.

Much of the two-plus hour session was taken up with a presentation by Craig Haney, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz who was a researcher on the Stanford Prison Experiment. He quickly focused in on the role mental illness played in driving up the prison population and how housing such a population makes it difficult to reduce costs.

The prisons department "has become the default placement for the state's mentally ill residents, along with our county jails," Haney said. "We're not alone in this in California. This is a national scandal. Beginning in the late 1980s, prisons began to replace hospitals for the nation's mentally ill."

He added, "If you put the increase in incarceration side by side with the decrease in the availability of state mental hospital beds, you can see an eerie parallel."

While California may not be alone in dealing with a crisis of mentally ill prisoners, it has been particularly hard hit by the phenomena. The Legislative Analyst's report devotes multiple paragraphs to a now-three-decade-old case on prisoner mental health care, Coleman v. Newsom, 2:90-cv-00520-KJM-DB (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990).

Since 1995, the prisons department has been under a series of orders in Coleman and related cases to reduce overcrowding and better serve mentally ill prisoners. These orders, the report notes, have increased costs in several ways, including by pushing the state to open a new prison health care facility in Stockton, whose mission includes treating mentally ill inmates.

A 2018 report from the Legislative Analyst noted California had the highest per capita cost in the nation for treating mentally inmates and some of the fastest growing expenses in this area. That report also noted the high cost of living in the state demands the state pay more for prison mental health staff.