In NewMexiKen’s recent drive through California I noticed a number of California penitentiaries I hadn’t remembered hearing about during my 12 years living in the state (but not since 1985). It occured to me that prisons were a growth industry. In her 2003 book, Where I Was From, Joan Didion confirms this impression and explains. Two excerpts:
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is the prison guards’ union, a 29,000-member force that has maintained for some years now the most effective lobbying operation in Sacramento. In the 1998 election cycle, for example, the union funneled over two million dollars to Grey Davis’s gubernatorial campaign and another three million dollars to various other candidates and propositions. … Don Novey refers to those who consider the need for new prisons an arguable proposition as “the other element.” He gave $75,000 to the opponent of a state senator who had once spoken against a prison bond issue. “If Don Novey ran the contractors’ union,” a Republican strategist told the Times, “there’d be a bridge over every puddle in the state.” The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims’ rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 “three strikes” legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.
Incarceration was not always a growth industry in California. In 1852 there was only San Quentin, by 1880 there was also Folsom. During the 104 years that followed, a century during which the population of California increased from 865,000 to 25,795,000 people, the state found need for only ten additional facilities, most of them low or medium security. It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, “New Folsom” (a quarter mile removed from “Old Folsom”) in 1986, Avenal and lone and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipatria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at Blythe in 1994, second prisons at both Susanville and Chowchilla in 1995, Soledad in 1996, a second prison at Corcoran in 1997.
It was 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first “death fence,” at Calipatria. It was 1994 when the second “death fence” was activated, at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperes, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death. … It was also 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California State University.