From Mother Jones
Dated Thursday July 7
Reforming California's Prisons: An Interview With Jackie Speier
The state senator is working to hold California's powerful corrections department to account.
Interviewed By Lisa Katayama
Chowchilla is a small town three hours southeast of San Francisco, home to vast acres of almond tree farms and two of the largest women's prisons in the world. A combined 8,000 women live in the Valley State Prison for Women and the Central California Women's Facility. 80 percent of these women are mothers; 71 percent are former victims of ongoing physical abuse; and more than half are incarcerated for non-violent crimes. The prisoners are routinely denied the access to basic necessities such as sanitary supplies, visits with their children, and medication. Meanwhile, California is one of the only places in the world where male guards oversee women's housing units, and complaints of sexual harassment abound. Yet very little attention has been paid to the rights of prisoners, and conditions within the system have long gone unmonitored.
There is, however, one thing that most Californians would agree on: too much money is spent on the prison industrial complex. The California Department of Corrections (CDC) costs taxpayers $5.3 billion per year to keep 163,000 men and women in prison—$31,000 per prisoner. Budgetary pressures finally came to a head when, after the CDC exceeded spending projections for the sixth straight year, State Senator Jackie Speier (D-CA) did what nobody else dared to do: she launched a series of investigations, through the Senate Select Committee on Government Oversight, on conditions in the prisons and how the CDC spends its money. Then, in February of 2005, Speier introduced seven bills related to prison reform, dealing with issues such as health care, education, drug treatment, housing, and gender sensitivity in women's prisons. These initiatives have pitted Speier against California's politically powerful prison guards' union, which has long benefited directly from the unfettered expansion of the prison system.
In April of this year, Jackie Speier spent the night at Valley State Prison for Women to find out for herself what the living conditions in a California women's prison were like. Having recently visited Valley State myself as an attorney representative for California Prison Focus, I was curious to hear about her experience, and to find out more about the reforms she was pursuing.
Read more.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
