It’s the Incarceration Rate, Stupid!
In the ongoing California prison crisis drama, the Modesto Bee has an unsigned editorial suggesting that the governor and many lawmakers are entirely wrong-headed in their methods of assessing the problem.
“The governor and others claim we need new prisons because California's population is increasing,” the editors write. “But they're looking at the wrong numbers. What they need to look at is California's state-prison-incarceration rates. In the early 1970s, the incarceration rate was about 100 per 100,000 population. Today, California has about 170,000 people in state prisons — an incarceration rate of more than 450 per 100,000.”
Incarcerating that much of one’s population comes with a hefty price tag, points out the Bee. In FY 1985-86, corrections took up 4.3 percent of the state’s budget. Now it’s at 8.8---and headed rapidly toward 10 percent.The answer, the editors suggest, is to find common sense ways of reducing the prison numbers through the use of sentencing alternatives such as conservation camps and fire crews for certain offenders, community facilities for others.