Doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result is insanity, and, in California, we’re gearing up to be more insane than ever.
I entered the Golden State’s prison system shortly before its peak: new prisons and yards were being thrown up quicker than jello shots at a kegger. With Three Strikes, “tough on crime,” and the war on drugs, the whole world was going to prison, and none of us ever expected to go home.
The swelling population demanded an equally bloated raft of resources to support it. The state legislature opened the money cannon full bore to sate the beast’s vast hunger, but no budget would ever be enough. As public safety dollars in the billions were dumped into the prison system (and recycled back to lawmakers through the miracle of modern corruption known as lobbying) the legal system mutated to facilitate this rampant growth. The possibilities—for locking people up—were endless.
Yet as the carceral giant tipped the scales with north of 160,000 souls in its belly, gravity began to pull the great beast apart at the seams. Moral outrage may be a nice fairytale hero, but, in reality, countless lawsuits, dysfunction, and good old-fashioned greed doomed the eater of so many lives. Slowly, glacially, things started to change.
Living in the midst of this downfall has been a surreal experience. Over the last sixteen years even the miniscule reforms that made it through the legislature have made increasing impacts like a snowball rolling down a hill. While we hardly noticed when they stopped sending parole violators to prison (keeping them in jail instead), and while we saw little benefit when first the emergency beds in the day rooms and then the triple-bunked gyms emptied out, now I am one of a paltry 80,000 and some remaining “incarcerated individuals.” While I used to see prisons opening, now I watch them close, shorn of the power they once held over us. No longer do I walk the yard with people serving life sentences for petty theft or drug possession—they’re gone, too.
We should be happy: the beast is dying. People who have been in prison for decades are going home—sometimes. Most of us can see a glimmer of hope ahead where once there was only a wall no human effort could surmount. But a dark star looms on the horizon, and into the vacuum of power left in the wake of one titan’s downfall steps another tyrant born afresh.
While the prison system is in decline, the last two years have seen the quiet passage of a host of laws regarding involuntary commitment and conservatorship that greatly expand California’s already robust arsenal of means by which it can force “residents” into “secure treatment facilities.” With Proposition 1 just rammed down our throats, the last puzzle piece clicks into place: the money cannon is poised to spew anew. Proposition 1, also known as the Behavioral Health Services Act, was passed by voters in March of this year’s primary election. It has a lot of moving parts, but the gist of it is that the state government assumes more control of the money that goes to mental health services, which dovetails to fund the governor’s whole “care court” scheme (involuntary commitment of the homeless, drug addicts, and mentally ill, and forced treatment as a jail alternative). That was passed a couple of years ago and is also tied in with conservatorship, which is being expanded under that system (they also had mobile judges and courtroom vans that can bring the experience of being locked up directly to the homeless consumer.)
6.4 billion dollars will be the first taste of blood this new beast gets, money that will flow like water into the various state mental health systems to open the new facilities needed to house thousands of new “patients” who don’t even realize what’s coming down the pipe.
Even more alarming, nobody appears to be questioning how doing the same thing under a different name is supposed to work magic against the vast host of California’s social problems when it failed so exquisitely before. Our prison system has an abysmal record of results when its scant successes are weighed against the massive financial burdens we’ve incurred on its benefactors’ behalf, not to mention the generational trauma inflicted on prisoners and staff alike.
Now that we’ve made a little progress towards un-mucking the mess we blundered into with “tough on crime,” crime seems to be going down alongside the declining prison population. Rather than build on those small successes, we are instead about to get “tough on homelessness” and restart the war on drugs on a different battlefield. We’re all set to lock up thousands of people in facilities that will, like the prisons of decades past, spring up all over the place aglow with that new money smell before rapidly descending into dysfunction, corruption, and abuse. Huzzah!
We’ve done this before. We learned that we can’t arrest our way out of social problems, yet we are doubling down. Those steering the ship have no qualms against imprisoning as many homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts as it takes to justify the budgets sure to balloon as they belly up to the feast our lack of foresight is laying out for them.
Maybe we ought to start the involuntary commitments with these lunatic hucksters selling us such a mad, self-destructive future.
Again.
