California's Own Iraq --$6 Billion a year wasted

By Alex Easton-Brown

The Prison-Industrial Complex is out of control

My wife taught at San Quentin for three years when it was maximum level, going from cell to cell teaching inmates who were too dangerous to let out into a classroom. Since then our inmate population has doubled to 168,000 and is disproportionately Black and Chicano.

We know that the parole system is broken. We know how diversion would prevent the break-up of families. Over 500,000 children have at least 1 parent in prison. Are we really prepared to pay the social costs of taking care of these kids, of keeping them from winding up in prison? We are escalating madly toward a very unstable, dangerous society. Only a few can afford to live behind locked gates, or hire personal bodyguards. How about the rest of us?

Go down to Courtroom N at Marin Civic Center any weekday morning and watch the people, mostly poor, mostly of color, get processed through the criminal justice system. It's almost too efficient -- where everyone involved is trying to keep their numbers up. The prosecutors are trying to maximize their convictions, even on petty, trivial stuff. The Public Defenders are overloaded and have to fight hard to resist `dealing out' their clients on lesser charges, under pressure from judges who want to clear their dockets. If not, the whole system collapses. Even if it means innocent people have to plead guilty. Lurking behind this facade, are the municipalities and the county, dependent on the fines being extracted from a population least able to afford them.

What we have here is `lock-in' where everybody's vested interest is blocking innovation.