Prison used to be for criminals, at least in California. But now we are all imprisoned, every citizen, every adult and child, every politician, every clergyman, every police officer, every teacher. No less than the most heinous criminal in Pelican Bay state prison or San Quentin or Chino, we are all in prison. Over the past 30 years we have created a society that imprisons and supervises far more citizens than we can afford.
Up until the mid-1970s the California prison population had been statistically stable throughout its history. In 1975, there were around 25,000 inmates in our prisons, and the state population was 21 million people thereabouts. If my math is correct, we imprisoned just over one-tenth of one percent of our population, or one per one-thousand citizens. Today, we have around 170,000 inmates in our prisons, and the state population is edging toward 38 million. So today we are putting nearly five-tenths of one percent, or five people per thousand in prison. In simple economic terms the free citizens today are paying to support five times as many prisoner citizens as we did in 1975.
The California state budget in the 1975-76 fiscal year was $11.5 billion — just over the dollar number now consumed by the state prison system alone. (Obviously, that’s 1975 dollars versus 2009 dollars.) The prison budget in the 1975-76 fiscal year was about $370 million or 3.2% of the total state budget. The newly created California state budget for 2009-10 is somewhere around $140 billion, depending on who is interpreting the numbers and how. The prison allocation of that total is around $10 billion. This year, the prisons use over 7% of the total state budget — more than twice what was being used in 1975.
Finding a way to spend less on prisons is a key to one of the doors that gets us out of prison. But we can’t get any closer to that key than a prison inmate can get to the keys that open the doors keeping him from freedom. Having fewer inmates in the prisons seems like the simplest way to go. Politician of all stripe, some wearing suits, others wearing badges, scare the bejesus out of us with dire warnings of our neighborhoods overrun by violent rapists, murderers, muggers and armed robbers. So we quake in fear and say we surely don’t want that. Then a few other political voices get together and say the people who staff and run the prisons are wildly overpaid and we can cut the prison budget there. Opposition to that quickly wells up on all sides, and there is no political will for entering that arena. When we compare California prison costs to other states it seems out of line. Average annual cost to support a California prison inmate is somewhere near $40,000. Over in Alabama, they get by on $13,000 per inmate. Why is that, we wonder, and satisfactory explanations usually get bogged down in thick detail, and soon we lose interest. So our finances seem to be the biggest lock in the biggest steel door holding us in prison. But that’s not all that stands between us and freedom.
The federal government says we do such a poor job operating prisons here in California, they have taken away our right to do so in a couple of areas. So many inmates die needlessly in our prisons (one every week), the feds say, that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Medical care, the feds tell us, is so bad they have to take it over and tell us how to do it. And part of doing that threatens to add billions of dollars more to our prison costs. Coming up with that kind of money just tightens the bonds of our own incarceration. Adding a little razor wire to the already electrified fences is a federal government order to reduce the total prison population by around 25%. So, not only are we trapped in our own prisons, but it feels as if the guards don’t really like us.
As citizens here in California who pay the bills for prisons, we are actually worse off than most of the prisoners whose freedom we take away. Almost all inmates can look forward to a day when they will leave the prison and taste something of freedom. Most have release dates, and well over 100,000 are released every year. On the other hand, those of us who pay the bills, and would appear to be free, can look forward to no date when our burden is removed, no time when we can reclaim the percentage of freedom we had as recently as 1975. Hope, it seems is denied us.
In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, the Andy Dufresne inmate character writes to the ‘Red’ Redding inmate character, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” If that’s true, the prisons of California and their policies and politics have robbed the citizens of hope, and that is truly a bad thing.
Prisoners All 
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