2-3pages essay book review

AMERICAN CROSSROADS EDITED BY EARL LEWIS, GEORGE LIPSITZ, PEGGY PASCOE, GEORGE SANCHEZ, AND DANA TAKAGI

PRISONS, SURPlUS, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION IN GlOBAUZING CAUFORNIA

RUTH WllSON GllMORE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

86 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY

uum of dependency and depravation. The crisis of state capacity

then became, peculiarly, its own solution, as the welfare-warfare

state began the transformation, bit by bit, to the permanent cri-

sis workfare-warfare state, whose domestic militarism is con-

cretely recapitulated in the landscapes of depopulated urban

communities and rural prison towns. We shall now turn to the

history of this "prison fix."

THREE

TH( PRISON f IX

The rhetoric of imprisonment and the reality of the cage are often in stark

contrast.

NORVAL MORRIS AND DAVID J. ROTHMAN, THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE PRISON (1995)

You know, in my life I've rarely been amazed. Rarely been amazed. But I'll tell

you what amazed me is the last time I was in [prison, in 1992]. I thought, you

know, look at all these guys in here. I thought, all these guys were in there for

something, you know, that they had done soMETHING. But then people started

telling me what they were in for. More than half the guys, they were in for

drugs, for possession. I mean, for NOTHING. That was truly amazing, you know,

tome.

40-YEAR·OLD EX-GANGSTER, PERSONAL COMMUNICATION (1994)

88 THE PRISON FIX

ow did California go about "the largest prison building

program in the history of the world" (Rudman and

Berthelsen 1991: i)? We have already seen that California's

political economy changed significantly in the 1970s, due

both to changes in the location of industrial investment-

capital movement-and to "natural" disasters. Those changes,

and responses to them, provided the foundation upon which new

rounds of capital movement and new natural disasters were

played out. These shifts produced surpluses of finance capital,

land, labor, and state capacity, not all of which were politically,

economically, socially, or regionally absorbed. The new Califor-

nia prison system of the 1980s and 1990s was constructed delib-

erately-but not conspiratorially-of surpluses that were not

put back to work in other ways. Make no mistake: prison build-

ing was and is not the inevitable outcome of these surpluses. It

did, however, put certain state capacities into motion, make use

of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take

more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.

FROM REFORM TO PUNISHMENT

Just as the rounds of disinvestment and calamity that occurred in

the 1970s political economy set the stage for how the 1980s crises

proceeded, so changes in California's prisons in the 1970s formed

the basis for the system's expansion. Not once, but twice, the ris-

ing power bloc of "tough on crime" and antiurban strategists

seized hard-won reforms designed to make the prisoner's lot less

desperate and transformed them into their inverse mirror im-

ages. Efforts to make the California Department of Corrections

(CDC) take rehabilitation seriously wiped rehabilitation from

THE PRISON FIX 89

the books. Efforts to free prisoners from crumbling prisons led to

the construction program that has never ended.

In 1977, California ended its sixty-year commitment to use the

state prison system as the sociospatial means to rehabilitate all but

the most intransigent prisoners (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991;

Cummins 1994). The 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing

Act was the legislature's response to a series of executive branch

courtroom losses during a twenty-five year struggle with state

prisoners. Prisoners had successfully used the federal bench,

under the 1867 Habeas Corpus Act, to demand that California

treat prisoners equitably, relieve overcrowding, and respect con-

stitutional rights (Cummins 1994). 1 Prisons have never been

pleasant places, and overcrowding was not a new phenomenon. 2

Prisoners have always fought both legally and extralegally to se-

cure decent conditions (Cummins 1994; Wicker 1975). However,

the post-World War II civil rights movement's courtroom suc-

cesses encouraged prisoners to use the system against itself; and

the growing fraction of Black people in the prison population

was cause for identification with struggles in the streets (Jackson

1970; Angela Davis 1971; Wicker 1975; Cummins 1994). The

movement also influenced prisoners from behind bars, because

the criminalization of political activists brought them into the

prison population (Cummins 1994; Angela Davis 1971).

The key issue was sentence length. California's 1917 Progres-

sive rehabilitation scheme had been coupled with indeterminate

sentences, on the theory that technically qualified "corrections"

professionals would help prisoners become useful and reliable

and that the "corrected" prisoners would then persuade local pa-

role boards of their readiness to rejoin society (Norval Morris

go THE PRISON FIX

1995; E. B. Freedman 1996). In practice, parole boards were

capricious and racist, representing local elites; prisoners sen-

tenced to one year to life languished in the penitentiary for

decades, petitioning at prescribed intervals for a chance to talk

their way out of cages (Jackson 1970).3 California's Progressives

had argued that they were devising a new system vastly different

from both the exploitative plantation models of Mississippi and

Louisiana (Oshinsky 1996; Lichtenstein 1996) and the Golden

State's older, punitive system (Bookspan 1991; Rudman and

Berthelsen 1991). However, the Progressive movement was gen-

erally committed to preserving racial and property hierarchies,

while creating institutions that would turn out people who re-

spected authority and knew their own limits (Thelan 1969; Allen

1994; Linda Gordon 1994; see also Don Mitchell 1996). In prac-

tice, California's indeterminate sentences extended to life sen-

tences for Black, Latino, and white prisoners whose failures to be

rehabilitated translated as their refusal to learn their proper

places in the social order (Irwin 1985; Jackson 1970; cf. Himes

(1945] 1986, 1971).

A second class of issues that prisoners litigated centered on

conditions of confinement. State, media, and intellectuals of the

late 1960s and early 1970s participated in the ideological produc-

tion of "moral panics" (Stuart Hall et al. 1978) to explain the so-

cial and political disorder sweeping the United States. At all lev-

els, states worked hard to characterize people agitating for justice

as morally wrong rather than politically dissident. The ensuing

criminalization of such activists swept what were then record

numbers of men and women off the streets and into custody,

with California in the vanguard (Miller 1996; Donner 1990; cf.

Stuart Hall et al. 1978; Bean 1973). The state's prison population

THE PRISON FIX 91

grew from about 16,500 to just under 23,000 between 1967 and

1971; the number rose and fell within a fairly narrow band over

the next few years, peaking at 24,700 in 1974 and bottoming out

at 19,600 in 1977 (CDC 1992; Rudman and Berthelsen 1991;

Cummins 1994). In addition to, or as a result of, problems of

sheer physical incapacity, the CDC could not or would not re-

spect the rights of inmates to "adequate life safety, health care

and recreation, food, decent eating ... and sanitation stan-

dards, ... visitation privileges, and access to legal services" (Sil-

ver 1983: 118; cf. Cummins 1994). Thus, the hostility, density, and

confusion that characterized state prison environments at the

time undermined any rehabilitative capacity prisons might have

had (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; Cummins 1994).

Federal courts throughout the United States in the 1970s fa-

vorably evaluated many prisoners' writs of habeas corpus and put

state corrections departments under federal order to remedy

constitutional wrongs (Benton 1983). Courts directed California

to relieve overcrowding and also to group prisoners according to

a transparent system of classifications in order to enhance the po-

tential for every individual's reform (SPWB 1985; Cummins

1994; Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; see also Bookspan 1991 for

earlier attempts at prisoner classification). If the purpose of these

federally demanded social and spatial remedies was to carry out

the mandates of Progressive-era lawmaking, the legislature re-

sponded by voiding the 1917 statute. The 1977 Uniform Deter-

minate Sentencing Act was California's formal abdication of any

responsibility to rehabilitate, stating neatly: "[T]he purpose of

imprisonment for crime is punishment."

In the 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act, and again

in that year's Budget Act, the legislature directed the CDC to

92 THE PRISON FIX

forecast prison bed need (LAO 1986).4 The CDC's initial at-

tempts to predict shortfall were quite modest and focused on ren-

ovating aging facilities and replacing the two oldest prisons-

San Quentin (built in 1852) and Folsom (opened in 1880). The

department's 1978 Facilities Planning Report proposed renovat-

ing 3,000 prison beds around the state. In 1980, the Facilities Re-

quirement Plan expanded the number of new and replacement

beds to 5,000, and forecast an increase in the capital needed to

carry out the project (LAO 1986).

In the turbulent years of his second and final term (1978-82),

Governor Jerry Brown took up the initial CDC analysis and

started work on designs for new facilities to replace the tier-and-

catwalk-style gothic structures at San Quentin and Folsom

(Morain 1994c; LAO 1986). Brown's new prisons were supposed

to be used for rehabilitation, in spite of the legislature's 1977 dec-

laration. The 1977 statute did not forbid rehabilitation; rather, it

excised its central importance (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). By

his own testimony, Brown could have used his power as the

state's chief executive to relieve overcrowding by ordering parole

for indeterminate-sentence prisoners who had served time equal

to the new sentencing requirements and by commuting sen-

tences for others who had been in the system a long time.5 In-

stead, he began to investigate the best way to improve plant and

modestly expand capacity, intending-or so he claimed-to use

state-of-the-art prisons for the benefit of prisoners and society

(Morain 1994c).

By 1980, the legislature had already approved replacing San

Quentin with two 500-bed, maximum-security units. In the

summer of 1982, Brown brought in a premier prison architect-

engineer, Paul Rosser, to design small, program- and common-

THE PRISON FIX 93

space-oriented prisons that would focus on education and other

rehabilitative activities (Morain 1994c; LAO 1986). Brown's plan-

ning combined vestiges of the early twentieth-century Progres-

sive sensibility-seeking to produce social peace through old and

new institutions and techniques of control-with a late

twentieth-century political shrewdness-seeking to convert the

moral panic over crime into an opportunity by having a skepti-

cal electorate support the exercise, rather than the restraint, of

state expansion (cf. L. M. Friedman 1993).

There were so many contradictory processes at work in the

1982 transition year from the lapsed welfare-state Democratic to

the supply-side Republican gubernatorial regime that it is some-

times difficult to grasp how they all coincided. The split widened

between Brown's commitment to what had become, in law, sec-

ondary (rehabilitation), and the primary purpose enshrined in

the new penal code. Without opposition from the lame-duck

chief executive, the legislature gave the CDC permission to build

on a larger scale than Brown had envisioned (Morain 1994d).

Brown had financed prison design studies out of reserve funds

appropriated by the legislature and initiated the era of new facil-

ities construction by approving a $15,000,000 expansion at the

California Correctional Institution in southern Kern County.

But in 1982, new commitments to the CDC started to rise steeply,

and the department revised its forecast-for the first time

proposing several major capacity-expanding facilities instead of

concentrating on renovation and replacement (LAO 1986). To

meet needs forecast by the CDC, the 1982 legislature approved

siting new facilities in Riverside, Los Angeles, and San Diego

Counties. That same year, the legislature successfully petitioned

voters to approve $495,000,000 in general obligation bonds

94 7H E PRISON FIX

(GOBs) to build new prisons-based on the argument that more

prison cells would enhance public safety and punish wrongdoers

(Morain l994d).

Also in 1982, the legislature reorganized the statutory rela-

tionship between itself, the CDC, and the prison expansion proj-

ect by forming a new entity, the Joint Legislative Committee on

Prison Construction and Operations (JLCPC0).6 Thereafter, the

CDC stood apart from all other state agencies in two ways. First,

its capital outlays would not be managed by the Office of Gen-

eral Services, which meant that its bidding and budgeting prac-

tices varied from long-standing procedures for construction of

state physical plant. Indeed, the CDC was explicitly exempted

from a competitive bidding process and instead allowed to assign

work to outside consultants (BRC 1990; LAO 1986).7 The expla-

nation for this extreme deviation from normal procedure focused

on the CDC's unique new charge to build an unspecified num-

ber of similar, expensive, highly specialized facilities in rapid suc-

cession (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1995; Rudman and

Berthelsen 1991; BRC 1990; LAO 1986). Second, the establish-

ment of the JLCPCO kept the CDC's ordinary and extraordi-

nary activities under close scrutiny and direction by elected offi-

cials (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; LAO 1986). The latter

appeared to keep the expansion of the prison system in the pub-

lic eye, insofar as the JLCPCO was required to hold hearings be-

fore either Department of Finance disbursement of appropriated

funds or Public Works Board implementation of CDC plans

(BRC 1990).

George Deukmejian's gubernatorial victory in 1982 com-

pleted the turn to the right California had begun under Ronald

Reagan in the 1960s. Deukmejian used the accumulating illegit-

THE PRISON FIX 95

imacy exemplified by tax revolts to attack the status quo-start-

ing with the weakest targets, such as persons receiving welfare

(cf. Piven 1992). He followed, rather than led, the tax struggle,

and at the end of California's second straight year of well-

reported declining crime rates, he proposed budget increases to

fight crime, appealing to voters' insecurity. It is more than ironic

that he campaigned against big government by arguing how the

government should grow. Deukmejian's gubernatorial oppo-

nent, Tom Bradley, had as mayor of Los Angeles successfully

controlled the rising share of the city budget that the LAPD and

the police and fire pension fund had commanded for more than

a decade.8 The police fought back by campaigning-statewide,

in uniform-for Deukmejian (Sonenshein 1993). Deukmejian

seized the issue and used the Los Angeles dispute to project race,

crime, and the need for state-building as a single issue, claiming

that the African American mayor's tightening of the LAPD

budget could only be the work of a man who was soft on crime.

Once Deukmejian took office in 1983, the administration

broadened Jerry Brown's new prison plan but dropped rehabili-

tation as the reason for new buildings. With punishment, in the

form of "incapacitation," now the rationale for prison, the ad-

ministration, the legislature, and the CDC (all three partially

consolidated via the JLCPCO) joined forces to expand the state's

built capacity for incarceration. But the state still had two imme-

diate problems: first, how better to guarantee potential prisoners,

and second, how to finance the facilities to cage them. Toward so-

lution of the former problem, the legislature changed the classi-

fication of certain offenses-such as residential burglary (Rud-

man and Berthelsen 1991) and domestic assault (E.G. Hill

1994)-to felonies requiring prison terms upon conviction. Sim-

96 THE PRISON FIX

ilarly, new drug laws-to some degree modeled on New York's

Rockefeller minimum mandatory sentence laws enacted in the

early 1970s (Plateau 1996; Miller 1996)-also enhanced the like-

lihood of prison time for people not formerly on the prison track

(Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The legislature further autho-

rized a State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence to study what

it called "street terrorism"-a topic to which we shall return.

The Board of Prison Terms, overseeing parole officers, made

common cause with the legislature, and instructed its field staff

to be liberal in revoking parole-an option used sparingly before

the new prison era; as a result, since 1983 people on parole have

had great difficulty remaining out of custody through their su-

pervisory period, with about 70 percent being returned to prison

for some portion of that time without having been convicted of

new crimes. 9

With these legal measures in place, the CDC deepened and

widened its planning. Beginning with the 1983 Facilities Master

Plan, it projected shortfalls in available beds as a crisis (LAO

1986). It is surprising neither that the CDC bed shortage esti-

mates varied considerably nor that they tended to climb. The es-

timates ranged from 16,rno to 55,000 throughout the 1980s to a

1994 all-time high of 151,641 for 1998, generated by the "three

strikes" law (SPWB 1985, 1986a, 1987, 1991; LAO 1986; CDC

1993, 1994, 1996). Under Deputy Director James Gomez, who

moved to the CDC from the Department of Social Services

Adult and Family Division in 1983, the department expanded its

planning staff (from 3 to 118), honed its forecasting, and from

1984 on began to produce five-year master plans that combined

technical number-crunching skills with a flair for emphasizing

the drama inherent in the "crisis" (LAO 1986). 10 Projected need

THE PRISON FIX 97

moved in tandem with the judiciary's legislature-produced ca-

pacity to remand persons to CDC custody. With the problem of

identifying wrongdoers partially solved, the question was how to

pay for all the new beds; and it was the new beds, rather than

court commitments, that led the system's growth.

CAPITAL FOR CONSTRUCTION

Although Sacramento had successfully persuaded taxpayers to

vote for the 1982 Prison Construction Bond Act, most elected of-

ficials were susceptible to an ongoing fear, inspired by Proposi-

tion 13, of asking voters to approve too many general obligation

bonds. GOBs pledge the full faith and credit of the state of Cali-

fornia, and the state constitution requires that any such debt be

approved by the legislature and ratified by the electorate (SPWB

1985). GOBs also provide a way to circumvent the constitutional

requirement of a balanced budget, because debt service for voter-

approved bonds is exempt from the rule (SPWB 1985). The

problem became how to expand a politically popular program

(prisons) without running up against the politically contradictory

limit to taxpayers' willingness to use their own money to def end

against their own fears. Frederic Prager of L. F. Rothschild, U nterberg, Towbin

(LFRUT), 11 one of the most creative and well-connected under-

writers in the California world of municipal finance, and his new

associate Tom Dumphy, came up with a plan approved by a bi-

partisan power bloc, including Democrats Jess Unruh (trea-

surer) and Willie Brown (Speaker of the Assembly), the Repub-

lican governor, George Deukmejian, and prison-expansion

activists in the legislature, led by State Senator Robert Presley

(R-Riverside) and Assemblyman Dick Robinson (R-Orange

98 THE PRISON FIX

County). The capitalists and the statesmen crafted a new way to

borrow money for prisons from existing debt-raising capacities.

The scheme involved using lease revenue bonds (LRBs) to sup-

plement GOB debt.

Prager's savvy and experience had led LFRUT to dominance

in California's private college facilities market. The state's inde-

pendent, not-for-profit postsecondary institutions could borrow

in the tax-exempt markets to develop or renovate infrastructure;

for California, these debts constitute "off-book" or "no-commit-

ment" loans, because their repayment does not entail any taxing

or other fiscal capacity of the state (SPWB r985; Sbragia r986).

Under Prager, LFRUT put together LRBs for the state's richest

and most powerful private universities-Stanford, the Univer-

sity of Southern California, and the California Institute of Tech-

nology. The creative firm also devised successful bond issues for

schools with more modest debt capacity, such as St. Mary's, Mo-

raga, Cal Lutheran, and the University of the Pacific, so that they,

too, could improve their facilities. In r98r-82, Prager worked

with the Association of Independent California Colleges and

Universities (AICCU) to issue an innovative revenue bond

whose proceeds would constitute a forward-funded market for

student loans. Thanks to an expose in the San Jose Mercury News

(September 5, r982), the voters got the incorrect idea that only

rich schools (and by inference, rich students) had access to these

public funds. Treasurer Unruh, looking to be reelected that fall,

demanded that public institutions be included in the deal. The

spike in interest rates in the early r98os made it difficult for

middle-income families to borrow for college in the private sec-

tor, while at the same time, mounting energy and other costs

pushed up tuition (R. W. Gilmore r99r). The loan deal was ex-

THE PRISON FIX 99

tended to all students in the state; and Unruh used the program

during his campaign to reassure the state's r.5 million students

and their parents-presumed members of the voting class-that

his office was looking out for their interests.12 A blunt politician

of the old school, Unruh also knew when to reduce flows to the

public trough; and in the early r98os, a bad economy and a tran-

sitional gubernatorial regime kept the old power broker's fist

tight on the spigot. Prager brought Dumphy to LFRUT in r983 to exploit his tal-

ents and connections in city government; he had previously been

a planner in Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's administration

and had also served as a youth probation officer in Massachusetts

early in his career (Dumphy r996). Together, Prager and

Dumphy worked hard to develop new California markets for

public debt (cf. Sbragia r986). The private college business was

already starting to tighten, because of most institutions' limited

capacity to increase tuition-the major source of operating rev-

enue for all expenditures, including student aid and debt service,

at all but the wealthiest schools (R. W. Gilmore r99r). They were

the pivot men between surplus private capital available for in-

vestment in the not-for-profit and public sectors and decreasing

state-approved outlets where the capital could be put to work.

The new prison construction program, in its infancy in r983,

constituted an excellent long-term opportunity for capital in-

vestment. Sacramento's old and new guards were ready to unite

behind the prison program, but they had to raise much more

money than anyone was brave or foolhardy enough to request

from voters. Lease revenue bonds were the solution. LRBs are issued by the

Public Works Board of the state of California, established in r946

100 THE PRISON FIX

to help smooth crisis as California adjusted to the postwar econ-

omy (SPWB 1985). Typical LRBs issued by the Public Works

Board are for real property loans for veterans and farmers, as

well as loans for public college and university facilities and hos-

pital buildings. In all cases, nongovernmental borrower pay-

ments or user fees are used to pay back the debt. While in all cases

the Public Works Board is forbidden to pledge California's full

faith and credit, in the case of public debt for public use, there is

an implied moral obligation that the state will exercise due dili-

gence to avert defaults (cf. Sbragia 1996). It was a risky but suc-

cessful political suspension of disbelief to use the state's implied

moral obligation to script a scenario in which the Public Works

Board and the CDC were characterized as entities buying, sell-

ing, and leasing property and rights between them (SPWB 1985).

For the prison LRBs, the "revenue" has consisted of general fund

appropriations authorized by the legislature to the CDC annual

operating budget, designated as "rental payments" to the Public

Works Board, which is the actual issuer of the debt (SPWB 1985,

l986a, l986b, 1987, 1990, 1991, l993a, l993b, l993c, l993d). lJn-

like with mortgage, postsecondary, or hospital issues, there is no

potential or actual nontax revenue stream at all.

The economics of prison LRBs is almost identical to the eco-

nomics of prison GOBs; the greatest difference between them is

political-the scope of approval needed to borrow huge sums.

The economic downside is that LRBs are slightly more expensive

than GOBs precisely because they do not pledge the state's tax-

ing power; for any debt, the higher the risk of nonpayment, the

higher the interest. However, in order to persuade all members

of the prison power bloc to exploit the LRB option, Prager and

Dumphy underscored the sole positive economic difference-

THE PRISON FIX 101

one that is in large part political as well. LRBs do not have to be

placed before the voters in general elections, and on approval by

the legislature, they can be relatively quickly organized and is-

sued in order to maximize favorable credit conditions, enabling

the CDC to build prisons closer to the time the facilities are bid

on, thus theoretically avoiding cost hikes. The capitalists and the

statesmen agreed that the trade-off between slightly higher in-

terest costs and quicker cash availability would balance the eco-

nomic difference and provide an effective political shield from

organized antitax activists.

In less than a decade, the amount of state debt for the prison

construction project expanded from $763 million to $4·9 billion

dollars, a proportional increase of from 3.8 percent to 16.6 per-

cent of the state's total debt for all purposes (SPWB 1985, 1993).

During the same period, state debt service (annual expenditure

for principal plus interest) increased from l percent to 2.8 percent

of per capita income (California State Controller 1996: 161).

The new source of capital enabled the CDC to follow the sec-

ond of two approaches it had proposed. The earlier of these, in

the late 1970s, had centered on keeping people convicted of non-

violent offenses in their communities and providing treatment

programs for the 70 percent or so of all convicted persons who are

addicted to drugs and alcohol (BRC 1990; LAO 1986; PRCC

1996). The state-of-emergency approach, which started to

emerge in 1982-83 (in Gomez's first year as deputy director for

CDC operations), sought simply to build as many prison cells as

possible. The end run around taxpayer-voters in order to raise

what turned out to be more than $2.5 billion in LRBs-in addi-

tion to nearly $2.5 billion in GOBs-was thus not only a politi-

cal strategy of economic subterfuge but also one of social policy

102 THE PRISON FIX

that set the Golden State in a new direction (SPWB 1985, l986a,

1986b, 1987, 1990, 1991, l993a, l993b, l993c, l993d).

SITING THE PRISONS

In order to realize the prison expansion program, the state

needed space in which to build the facilities. 13 California acquires

from one to three sections of land (640-1,920 acres) for each ap-

proved site. For a typical facility built since 1982, the buildings,

yards, parking lots, roads, perimeter, and fences incorporate

300-350 acres. 14 Initially, too, there was some concern that siting

might prove a challenge because communities would be afraid to

have prisons in their midst (BRC 1990). There was ample evi-

dence from around the United States that prison siting could be

difficult, with the facilities constituting highly contested locally

unwanted land uses (LULUs), producing "not in my back yard"

(NIMBY) dramas (see, for examples, Lake 1992, 1994; Krause

1992; Sechrest 1992; Carlson 1988, 1992; Travis and Sheridan

1983; cf. Lake 1992, 1994). As a result, the state was prepared to

exercise its right of eminent domain and condemn lands in order

to accumulate sufficient acreage for project development (LAO

1986; State of California 1990).

In anticipation of future siting struggles, the legislature at first

determined that new prisons should be located south of the

Tehachapi Mountains, whence, at the time, 59 percent of prison-

ers originated. The reasoning was that those who produced the

prisoners deserved the LULUs. However, the regional edict was

almost immediately revised, starting in 1982. The legislature ap-

proved new maximum security facilities adjacent to the ex-

panded California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi (a tiny,

high-altitude, sod-producing agricultural valley in southern

THE PRISON FIX 103

Kern County) to replace San Quentin (which was in any case

never closed). The legislature also approved a new hospital

prison to supplement the crowded and deteriorating hospital

prison at Vacaville (Solano County) in the Great Central Valley,

forty-five minutes' drive southwest of Sacramento. As word of

these authorizations traveled back to legislators' constituencies

from 1982 on, word returned by way of delegations of comm u-

h . h h ?" nity boosters, "But what about us? W y not ng t ere.

In 1983, the CDC established a Prison Siting Office under the

general direction of the department's Government and Com-

munity Relations Branch. A nasty fight in Los Angeles over the

siting of the prison authorized for that county provided the

backdrop for the political and marketing work of the siting of-

fice. The legislature had selected a site in East Los Angeles, the

heart of the city and county's Mexicano and Chicano commu-

nity. The characterization of Los Angeles as a county producing

criminals but unwilling to shoulder its responsibility to house

them played well across the state political map, especially in the

suburbs and the inland valleys. At the same time, both the gov-

ernor and legislature presumed that the promise of jobs would

offset the hesitancy of a working-class community of color to

have a prison located in its midst. The state was surprised by the

vehement political opposition to the prison organized by neigh-

borhood mothers ("Las Madres") in the area's public housing

project and an activist Roman Catholic priest (Pardo 1998; Krier

1986; Pulido l995b). The political danger in imposing the prison

on East Los Angeles against the will of the area's residents lay in

the fact that any elected official, Democrat or Republican, was

increasingly vulnerable to the voting power of California's ex-

panding Latino population (Paddock 1986). The governor thus

104 THE PRISON FIX

retreated before the potential identitarian political bloc pre-

sented by protesters, even though he had vowed that the prison

would be sited in the city. Eventually, the owner of the tract sold

the land to a nonstate entity (Paul Jacobs 1986), although it was

another year before the project was officially shelved (Wolinsky

1987).15

The LA prison battle gave legislators from other state regions

the chance to voice their constituents' willingness to have a prison

in their midst, and the siting office helped by sending represen-

tatives-usually women-to talk reassuringly at town meetings

about the benefits and costs associated with such a development

plan. An anti-LA righteousness, which turned on an almost pa-

triotic notion of duty, cloaked the eagerness of small-town dele-

gations who came to Sacramento looking for prisons to revive

isolated, flagging economies (Wolinsky 1987). Industry closures,

downsizing, and capital abandonment left large tracts of land

available for development. Contrary to contemporary folklore,

the towns where prisons were sited, while deeply divided by

class, are not all Anglo communities, and unlike in Los Angeles,

the political opposition to prison development was more easily

managed by pro-prison forces, aided by the CDC's persuasive

prospectuses promising jobs and other amenities. In largely rural

areas with few employers, opposition to the prisons did not gal-

vanize so readily. In Avenal, Corcoran, Coalinga, and Del Norte,

for example, the major opposition came from those materially, or

romantically, dependent on the traditional economy. 16 At the

same time, with few or no alternatives available to raise income

(such as rent) generated by real property, smallholders in the

towns and most workers, then and now, have clung to the gen-

THE PRISON FIX 105

erally unsubstantiated belief that the benefits of a prison out-

weigh the negative effects. The concentration of new prisons in the Central Valley, and

along the state's southern and southeastern perimeter from Rock

Mountain (southern San Diego County) to Blythe Valley (River-

side County), is the result of the confluence of political and eco-

nomic forces embedded in, and built on, the historical power of

agriculture and r.esource extraction in the state. Although agri-

cultural and resource extraction activities account for only about

3 percent of total state product, these sectors, running at about

$30 billion annually, have commanded great power in Sacra-

mento, not least because they dominate the districts and counties

where they are located, controlling many local legislators and

county and town governments, in part through making substan-

tial campaign contributions (Walters 1992; Don Mitchell 1996;

Pisani 1984). In the midst of the LA prison debacle, the CDC Siting Office

determined that rural communities would be the most easily

managed sites. 17 The 640 to l ,920 acres sought for each site would

not come laden with costly political opposition in small towns.

Those that were eventually successful in having prisons sited in

their vicinity had well-organized delegations and very few ob-

jections to or demands on the CDC's proposals. They also had

large landholders willing to sell nearby surplus acres that the

towns could incorporate in order to reap the imagined harvest of

state subventions, sales tax, and other incomes. We have already

seen that roo,ooo acres per year of irrigated agricultural land had

been coming out of production starting in 1978; eighteen of the

twenty-four new prisons sited between 1982 and 1998 were (or

106 THE PRISON FIX

are being) built on formerly irrigated agricultural lands, and all

but four of the twenty-four at the time of their siting lay outside

the swathes of suburbanization moving into the Central and In-

land Valleys. 18

It seems contradictory that large, powerful landholding capi-

talists, accustomed to activating the state's capacity in enormous

profit-enhancement projects, such as water development, would

relinquish acres to the state. What was in it for them? First, they

sell land-often the worst-that would otherwise be idle and

more often at an inflated price (CCPOA n.d. [1996]; BRC 1990).

Second, the state improves the land, and those improvements,

coupled with the promise of employment, in the short run in-

crease nearby land values. These two goals were summarized by

a former head staffer of the JLCPCO concerning a dispute be-

tween the CDC and a site where the owners had surreptitiously

extended the state-owned infrastructural improvements-at

state cost-onto an adjacent parcel they intended to develop into

a shopping mall: "They have all this land, and they are trying to

bring up the values so they can develop it. That's how they hope

to save their town." 19

Surplus land connects to surplus labor; as in the past, rural

capital has successfully externalized to the state costs associated

with changes in production. Prison development has had the in-

tended, although rarely realized, effect of providing jobs, and

therefore supplementing household incomes for workers, who

presumably would be less likely to organize for jobs, higher

wages, or more radical goods, such as land reform, that can be

gained only at capital's expense (Woods 1998). Rather, the actual

and almost dispossessed (Jacqueline Jones 1992) have in this in-

stance, as in so many others, been deflected to petitioning the

THE PRISON FIX 107

state for benefits within the narrowing scope of prison develop-

ment and related opportunities.

PRODUCING MORE PRISONERS

The state initiated new rounds of criminalization as elected offi-

cials scrambled to sponsor new laws. The rationale for the laws

purported to be reducing violence in communities. The means

was sentence enhancement, or intensified "incapacitation"-to

prevent people from committing crimes by keeping them in cages

for as long as possible. Sentence enhancement adds fixed amounts

of extra time to standard sentences for certain offenses. The leg-

islature relieved the judiciary of the responsibility to determine a

wide range of sentences by writing the specifics into the law. Leg-

islators from across the political spectrum, from Robert Presley

(R-Riverside) and Bill Jones (R-Fresno) on the right to Jim Costa

(D-Fresno) in the center to Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) on

the left, sponsored sentence-enhancing legislation; almost every-

body sponsored some law, collectively creating a plethora of new

crimes for the state's fifty-eight district attorneys to prosecute.

The legislature had commissioned a State Task Force on

Youth Gang Violence in 1984, whose findings, reported back to

the legislature in 1986, resulted in the Street Terrorism Enforce-

ment and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988, as subsequently

amended. With that law, California established a mandate di-

recting all local law enforcement agencies to identify street gang

members and enroll them in a statewide database. The law en-

hances sentences imposed on those whom enforcement has iden-

tified as street gang members. 20 Upon future encounters with law

enforcement, listed persons face additional charges based on

their alleged status as gang members. Thus, while a non-gang

108 THE PRISON FIX

member arrested for a particular offense would be charged only

with that offense, a gang member would be charged both with

the offense and with being a gang member who had committed

the offense. U pan conviction, the sentence for the original offense

would be "enhanced" by from one to five years of extra time.

The decriminalization of controlled substance possession in

the 1970s had caused the number of people in prison on drug-

related charges to plummet (CDC 1992,Historical Trends). Drug

recriminalization, coupled with mandatory sentences for drugs

that had not been decriminalized and for new drugs such as

crack cocaine, pushed controlled substance commitments back

up throughout the r 98os. Whereas in r 977, drug offenses had ac-

counted for only some ro percent of new admissions to the CDC,

by 1990, they accounted for 34.2 percent (Rudman and

Berthelsen r 99 r; CDC r 992, Historical Trends), al though all drug

use peaked in 1978 and fell thereafter (Tonry 1995).

In addition to new laws designed to control drugs and gangs,

the state launched a high-profile "three strikes" campaign. Al-

though, as in most other jurisdictions in the United States, Cali-

fornia had had sentence enhancement for repeat convictions for

many years, the legislature passed the nation's second "three

strikes" law in March 1994, and an initiative on the following

November ballot solidified the statute into an expression of "the

people's" will (Reynolds et al. 1996).21 More broadly written than

any law of its type in the United States (John Clark et al. 1996),

the California version includes nonviolent prior convictions

among eligible "strikes," sets no age, temporal, or jurisdictional

limitations on priors, and allows prosecutors to use their power

to "wobble" charges in order to make current misdemeanors into

felonies and therefore strikable.22

THE PRISON FIX 109

From 1980 onward, crime was objectively and subjectively

different from what it had been prior to the 1977 Uniform De-

terminate Sentencing Act and the subsequent authorization,

funding, and siting of new prisons. Politicians of all races and

ethnicities merged gang membership, drug use, and habitual

criminal activity into a single social scourge, which was then used

to explain everything from unruly youth to inner-city homicides

to the need for more prisons to isolate wrongdoers. The media

amplified the message by giving crime reporting top billing

(Hadjor 1995; Males 1996; Miller 1996; Glassner 2000). Inner-city

residents were, indeed, seeking relief from fearful disorders in

their communities, and they, like their suburban counterparts,

tended to accept the primary definitions of what crime was and

what should be done about it-until direct experience of the

law's unevenness raised questions about the actual intent of the

legislation in the first place (chapter 5). The legislature and initiative-passing voters handed prosecu-

tors powers once reserved for judges-such as evaluation of mit-

igating factors or eligibility for diversion programs (Tonry 1995;

Miller 1996; Reynolds et al. 1996; for federal precedents, see

Baum 1996). While prosecutors could decide not to exercise the

full extent of their new powers-and some did-such agents of

law enforcement were in a contradictory position. As elected of-

ficials, prosecutors were expected to run "against" crime, and if

they failed to do so, they risked being thrown out of office, and

their bureaucracies risked losing ground in county-level budget

competitions.23 The largest jurisdictions in the Southland, espe-

cially Los Angeles County, eagerly embraced the legislative rul-

ings and began vigorous enforcement campaigns, paid for by

both state and federal funds (Sengupta 1992). 24

Police forces

110 THE PRISON FIX

throughout the state, from tiny rural sheriffs' offices to the highly

capitalized LAPD, systematically fulfilled their mandates

through enhanced surveillance of neighborhoods and individu-

als suspected of extralegal activity (Sengupta 1992).25

Concentrating power through the use of status determina-

tions (gang/not gang; prior/no prior) and minimum mandatory

sentences, the new laws widened and deepened the capacity of

police, prosecutors, and judges to identify, arrest, charge, and

convict people and remand them to CDC custody. Indeed, the

legislature embarked on a criminal-law production frenzy, pass-

ing more than mo, and sometimes as many as 200, pieces of new

legislation each year since 1988-up from the former output of

20-25 pieces, which included routine amendments of existing

statutes (Greenwood et al. 1994). As a result, by 1994, the back-

log had become so great that it was impossible to clear the leg-

islative calendar by the end of each term, and the criminal law

subcommittees of the judiciary committees in both houses of the

legislature had become regular standing committees dealing ex-

clusively with criminal legislation. The establishment of the new

committees also produced powerful legislative niches for their

chairs in the two houses, because legitimizing the prison expan-

sion and operation program of the state's fastest-growing de-

partment directly depended on the path taken by criminal legis-

lation (SPWB 1985, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d; LAO 1986,

1996).

Working-class African Americans and Latinos-especially

Chicanos-experienced the most intensive criminalization

(Schiraldi and Godfrey 1994), trailed by urban and rural Anglos

of modest means. As we can see in table 4, Anglos dominated the

prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until

THE PRISON FIX 111

TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY

Total Anglo African Latino Other

Year Number (%) (%) (%) (%)

1977 19,623 43.0 34.0 21.0 2.0

1982 34,640 36.0 36.0 26.0 2.5

1988 76,171 30.8 37.1 27.8 4.3

1995 135,133 29.5 31.3 34.1 5.0

2000 162,000 29.4 31.0 34.8 4.8

souRcEs: CDC 1992, table 4; CDC, Characteristics of Population, 1995, 2002.

1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board-

with the total number of those incarcerated approximately dou-

bling during each interval. African American prisoners sur-

passed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been

overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest

rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California,

or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and

Beck 1997). The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of

the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state's con-

centrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a re-

markable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los

Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners

are modestly educated men in the prime oflife: 88 percent are be-

tween 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from

high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is func-

tionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who

worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately

112 THE PRISON FIX

1980

1995

2000

TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE

(%)

Violent Property

63.5 24.2

41.8 25.3

25.3 26.0

Drug

7.4

26.4

39.0

souRcEs: CDC 1992; CDC, Characteristics of Population, 1995, 2000.

before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent

in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population,

various years).

At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new crim-

inal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the

political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, con-

centrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence.

"Crime" and "violence" seemed to be identical. However, as

table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or

most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a

preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in

1995· More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than

half of l995's commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or

of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, bur-

glary, motor vehicle theft.

The outcome of the first two years of California's broadly

written "three strikes" law presents a similar picture: in the pe-

riod March 1994-January 1996, 15 percent of controlling of-

fenses were violent crimes, 3 l percent were drug offenses, and 41

THE PRISON FIX 113

percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper

Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these

numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were

Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliber-

ate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas,

combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these

numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force

on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between pre-

sumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduc-

tion when he wrote: "We are talking about well-organized,

drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young

hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape,

robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living"

(Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added). The correspondence be-

tween regions suffering deep economic restructuring, high rates

of unemployment and underemployment among men (cf. S. L.

Myers 1992), and intensive surveillance of youth by the state's

criminal justice apparatus present the relative surplus population

as the problem for which prison became the state's solution (see

also Males 1999).

INDUSTRIALIZING PUNISHMENT

As should be clear by now, surplus state capacity is not an ab-

solute thing, but rather a quality that can emerge over time as a

result of the difference between what states can do technically and

what they can do politically. Technical capacity does not disap-

pear even when certain practices lose legitimacy in the eyes of

voters, or capitalists, or other key interests. The idea here is not

that there are idle bureaucrats on "pause" waiting for someone to

114 THE PRISON FIX

hit "play," but rather, more modestly, that power is not a thing

but rather a relationship based on actually existing activities.

Thus, the renovation of surplus state capacity, the putting into

motion of its potential power, is grounded in contradictory po-

litical economic conditions-conditions that are at once enabling

and constraining. The successful political promotion of fear of

crime as the key problem, and the ideological legitimacy of the

U.S. state as the institution responsible for defense at all levels, al-

lowed California to act (cf. R. W. Gilmore 2002a). The state

could build prisons, but not just anywhere. The state could bor-

row money, but not always openly. The state could round up per-

sons who correspond demographically to those squeezed out of

restructured labor markets, but not at the same rate everywhere.

After twenty years, $s billion in capital outlays, and the accumu-

lation of 161 ,394 prisoners (as of April 2004),26 the CDC has be-

come the state's largest department, with a budget exceeding 8

percent of the annual general fund-roughly equal to general

fund appropriations for postsecondary education.

The rapid growth of the CDC in the 1980s, aided by the co-

operation of police, city councils, county supervisors, district at-

torneys, and legislators, prompted agency critiques that focused

not on justice but rather on efficiency. Was the CDC fulfilling its

mandate in the most cost-effective manner? The critiques did

not discuss whether crime was, indeed, the central social problem

for state action, nor did they refer to the post-1980 decline in

crime rates-even incorrectly to claim that prisons work. The

Legislative Analyst's 1986 report "The New Prison Construction

Program at Midstream" proposed streamlining features of the

CDC's design, bid, and build system in order to gain cost savings

and have new beds available when the projected shortfalls were

THE PRISON FIX 115

expected to occur. The report also criticized the department's

planning and productivity, whose weaknesses, according to the

analyst, derived in part from variables associated with consult-

ing, siting, and scheduling problems. The report revealed the di-

alectics of politics and economics that shaped the prison expan-

sion program from the start. It characterized the department's

productivity shortfall as the result of an insufficiently rational-

ized process and recommended that the legislature take charge

of moving the department into greater efficiency through "mile-

stones" (or "speedup") from concept through occupancy-in ef-

fect, by legislating efficiency (LAO 1986: see esp. 43-45).

The year 1990 saw a major turn in the political atmosphere:

voters approved a prison construction GOB in April but then

roundly defeated another prison GOB the following November.

In 1990 and 1991, reports prompted by the Legislative Analyst's

1986 report suggested that the CDC could do a better job of fore-

casting the types of prisoners it would have in custody, and there-

fore do a better job budgeting for expanded capacity. As noted

earlier, the CDC has consistently forecast high growth in highest-

security (Level IV) prisoners, and, according to both the Blue

Ribbon Commission on Prison Population Management (1990)

and Rudman and Berthelsen (reporting to the legislature in

1991), it consolidated the tendency to classify those in custody as

higher risks than they might actually be.27 Level IV beds are the

most expensive to build; and Level IV prisoners are the most ex-

pensive to maintain, because oflow guard-prisoner ratios.

In 1991, California experienced what turned out to be a tem-

porary decline in the number of arrests leading to felony convic-

tions, but when James Gomez, who had assumed the CDC di-

rector's mantle the year before, was asked by a reporter to

116 THE PRISON FIX

comment on the news, he expressed concern that a drop in actual

prisoners from forecast numbers might adversely affect the de-

partment's construction program (Hurst 1991 b). Growth and ef-

ficiency were the primary considerations in the view of this ca-

reer bureaucrat, who had been hired by the department for his

experience managing large budgets and staffs and for his plan-

ning skills (SPWB 1985). The ideological and material processes

at work made Gomez's shocking response on some level an ex-

pression of common sense.

Crime topped most polls as public anxiety number one in

1991-perhaps because of the sudden rise in violence following

the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf (R. W. Gilmore 2002a;

Archer and Gartner 1984)-even though California was deep

into its worst recession since the Great Depression (Walker

1995). Indeed, the recession brought about a temporary decline in

arrests, because urban police forces under emergency budgetary

constraints decided not to pursue drug users and some other cat-

egories of arrestable people (Hurst l991a, l991b). The lull in ar-

rests did not last, however, and law enforcement around the state

reintensified across-the-board surveillance and arrests in 1992,

prompted by the general crackdown following the Los Angeles

uprising in April of that year (Mike Davis l993b, l993c). The

CDC ratcheted up forecasts again, and the legislature approved

$985 million in LRBs, which were issued in 1993 (SPWB l993a,

l993b, l993c, l993d). Consistently, from 1982 to 1996, the CDC

had six to ten new prisons in some stage of planning, design, or

construction, at an average cost per establishment of a quarter-

billion dollars.

The size, cost, and complexity of CDC construction and op-

erations prompted a new round of critical studies, published in

THE PRISON FIX 117

the spring of 1996. The California Department of Finance Per-

formance Review cited the department for lax attention to bud-

get lines and for outsourcing functions, such as medical care, that

could more efficiently, and cost-effectively, be internalized by the

department inside prison walls (CDF 1996). The CDC's enor-

mous operating budget is also a rather flexible one, and the de-

partment has been able to move costs among line items during a

fiscal year. Thus, funds designated for prisoners' medical ex-

penses can be used to pay guards' overtime, when guards escort

prisoners to outside facilities for treatment. In the CDF report,

guards' overtime constituted a general cause for concern, with

the department following U.S. big-firm industrial practice by re-

quiring lots of overtime rather than expanding the size of

benefit-basis staff (CDF 1996; cf. Harrison 1994; David Gordon

1996; Henwood 1997). The CDF pointed out that straight-time

pay to permanent part-time guards (reserves) would be cheaper

than overtime pay to the average rank-and-file benefit-basis

guard (CDF 1996). The overtime issue focused both on the cost

of overtime and on the CDC's failure adequately to plan for

staffing needs.28 The issue of planning was, for the CDF, a sign

that the CDC, the state's agency of control, was itself out of con-

trol, and might require the kind of direct oversight by another

agency-such as the CDF-that it had been exempted from for

the previous fourteen years (CDF 1996; LAO 1986; cf. Gregory

Hooks 1991). The second critical study published in 1996, commissioned by

the University of California, brings into sharper focus the in-

trastate competition that the CDC's growth had produced (Ash-

ley and Ramey 1996). The report demonstrates how rival agen-

cies tried, via critique, to situate themselves at the CDC's trough.

118 THE PRISON FIX

David Ashley and Melvin Ramey, professors of civil and envi-

ronmental engineering from UC Berkeley and UC Davis, re-

spectively, took on the question of capital cost reduction. As with

the earlier studies, the central problem remained crime and its

mitigation through imprisonment, and the solution turned on

cost-effectiveness in the design-bid-build sequence for prison

construction-rather than any reevaluation of, for example, the

relation between crimes (old or new), education, and recidivism

(Ashley and Ramey 1996; cf. Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The

unspoken power of this study lies in the way the university pre-

sents itself, via its sober, analytical engineering faculty, as an em-

inently efficient institution. Certainly, the university had been

struggling to transform its image from that of a product of Pro-

gressive Era-through-Cold War social welfare activism to that

of a competitive knowledge factory increasingly responsive to

market forces (R. W. Gilmore 1991).29 To that end, in 1995 the

Regents of the University of California formally shed affirmative

action over the objections of faculty, staff, students, and senior

administration at the university's nine campuses, because, in the

race-neutral language of racism, affirmative action is an ineffi-

cient (nonmarket) mode of resource allocation. The pitched

competition between the CDC and all others dependent on the

general fund seems to have prompted the university to criticize

the CDC in such a way that the university itself would become a

necessary player in the CDC project as a supplier of efficiency ex-

pertise, while freeing up funds for other productive state activi-

ties.

Community colleges approached cooperation more straight-

forwardly than did the elite University of California. The num-

THE PRISON FIX 119

ber of applicants for prison guard jobs was consistently high dur-

ing the 1980s and 1990s, with as many as 200 competing for each

apprentice slot. To tighten the pool, and to enhance the profes-

sional specialization associated with being a guard, the CCPOA,

in conjunction with the CDC, determined that new recruits

after July l, 1995, should be minimally armed with an approved

A.S. degree in correctional science before reporting for basic

training at the department's Richard McGee Training Facility.

Community colleges throughout the state in the immediate labor

market of new prisons, such as West Hills College in Coalinga,

instituted A.S. degree programs with the explicit aim of both

preparing new applicants for apprentice appointments and edu-

cating current guards, who become eligible for raises and pro-

motions after completing the program (West Hills Community

College District l 996). The colleges hoped that in addition to en-

hancing enrollments, the program would give local residents a

better chance of filling one of the state's best working-class career

slots. They also provided basic orientation for all new guards and

some training for reserves (permanent part-time officers); for all

enrollments, they charged the state general fund according to av-

erage daily attendance (ADA), as they would do with any other

academic program (West Hills Community College District

1996; LAO 1996).30

The new degree requirement for guards, with a prescribed

curriculum, illustrates one tendency of the state's burgeoning

punishment system to both specialize and centralize staff and

functions (cf. Chandler 1990). Professional expertise and techni-

cal specialization in the governmental sector is not new, having

evolved over several generations from the Progressives' move-

120 THE PRISON FIX

ment to make the state at once immune to corruption and more

active in people's everyday lives (see, for examples, G. E. Gilmore

1996; Linda Gordon 1994; Hooks 1991), and from capital's need

to spread out the costs of developing productive infrastructure

and controlling labor to as many pockets and balance sheets as

possible (O'Connor 1973; Piven and Cloward 1971; Woods 1998).

We have seen that the legislature established permanent com-

mittees to review the proliferating crime bills. In addition, after

r 993, the legislature slowly moved toward rationalizing and uni-

fying the state's trial court system, with the goal of making the ju-

risdictions more uniform, efficient, and cost-effective (LAO

1993, 1996).

In the manner of a modern industrial enterprise (Chandler

1990), the CDC further embraced the move toward centraliza-

tion and functional specialization by establishing an internal fi-

nance capital department headed by Tom Dumphy, the under-

writer who helped devised the LRB solution to the politics of

debt issuance. Dumphy's appointment responded to allegations

of inefficiency by having an expert on staff who could guide the

structure and sale of either LRBs or GOBs and enable the CDC

to issue competitive rather than negotiated bonds. The move

came at a time when the difference between negotiated and

competitive bond costs, while still measurable, had dropped (Si-

monsen and Robbins 1996). However, the key argument for set-

ting up the office was the CDC's forecasting, which continued to

project severe shortfalls in prison capacity a decade into the

twenty-first century (CDC 1996; LAO 1996). The "midstream"

in the title of the Legislative Analyst's r 986 report seems to have

been a moving metaphor, with the CDC never more than

halfway to completion of its project. 31

THE PRISON FIX 121

PIGS GET FATTENED, BUT HOGS GET SLAUGHTERED

In the summer of 1996, rival power blocs staged a showdown in

Sacramento. On one side were Governor Pete Wilson, James

Gomez, director of the California Department of Corrections

(CDC), and Don Novey, president of the California Correctional

Peace Officers' Association (CCPOA), who sought to issue $r.6

billion dollars in lease-revenue bonds to build six new prisons.

The other bloc, led by the powerful Democratic State Senators

Bill Lockyer (Hayward) and Dan Boatwright (Contra Costa),

had rejected the CDC's request, approved by the governor and

promoted by the CCPOA. On the heels of the deeply critical performance reviews by the

CDF and the University of California, the Los Angeles Times

published an expose about the extraordinary number of prison-

ers shot dead by guards in Corcoran, one of the state's two new

supermax facilities. Such sudden, intense, and unfavorable

scrutiny puzzled the CDC director. For most of the prior fifteen

years, the CDC had been California's fastest-growing depart-

ment, with an operating budget that had grown to nearly roper-

cent of the state's general fund. The CDC prison construction

project was, according to a number of analysts, the largest in the

world. Strategists envisioned packaging the design, engineering,

and contracting successes that emerged from the experience of

building nearly two dozen new small-city-sized complexes, and

selling the Golden State prison plan to the rest of the United

States and abroad. Director Gomez asked his political boss, Senator Boatwright,

then JLCPCO chair, what the department could possibly be

doing wrong suddenly to attract so much negative attention-

after so many years as the state's darling agency. According to an

122 THE PRISON FIX

eyewitness, the senator replied in his dry, Arkansas-bred drawl,

"Aw Jim! Don't you know? Pigs get fattened, but hogs get

slaughtered!" (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1996).

But was it yet a fully grown hog? Surpluses that accumulated

in California, combined with the state's need to legitimate itself

in the face of profound fiscally expressed voter disapproval, en-

abled the CDC to expand into the state government's largest de-

partment. As in the rest of the United States, crime became

firmly established as a permanent problem, for which the solu-

tion is the continued proliferation oflaws, courts, judges, bailiffs,

law enforcement personnel, technologies of surveillance, heli-

copters, and other means of domestic warfare, including, of

course, prisons. And yet, as Dan Boatwright pointed out to the

dispirited James Gomez, something that got as big as the CDC

would sooner or later come up against a limit to growth. Why?

At least theoretically, because the variably assessed returns on in-

vestment-in legitimacy, in safety, in securing the Central Val-

ley voters or local economies, or big-rancher contributions-

would dwindle to a margin no longer worth the costs.

The combatants who lined up on opposing sides in Sacra-

mento represented several perspectives on the future of the CDC

hog. Some thought it should reproduce smaller versions of itself

at lower levels around the state. Others thought it should be sold

while the market for hogs was good. And still others thought it

should just grow as big as it might. How to decide? Those who

favored putting the GOB on the ballot wanted the voters to tell

them what to do. The opponents of that plan insisted that the

voters had spoken again and again and unequivocally empow-

ered the state to determine the correct path.

Bill Lockyer and Dan Boatwright were determined to test the

THE PRISON FIX 123

CDC's (and their own) legitimacy by putting the first prison

GOB in six years on the November 1996 ballot. Don Novey and

his union, the CCPOA, aligned with Governor Pete Wilson,

were afraid that if the voters said no, the prison expansion pro-

gram would be hamstrung, because few legislators would be

brave enough to pass an LRB immediately after a negative ref-

erendum on prison debt. Wilson decided not to fight Lockyer

and Boatwright, Gomez started to look for a new job, and the

CCPOA, one of the state's largest political donors, circulated a

4 oo-page report on the most efficient way to build and staff new

facilities, endorsed by testimonials from CCPOA-funded vic-

tims' associations, the National Rifle Association, and other such

d h . 32

experts aroun t e nation. Lockyer formed a bipartisan, bicameral Prison Reform Con-

ference Committee to figure out how Sacramento could free it-

self from across-the-board primary responsibility for punish-

ment (PRCC 1996). In the scenario that Lockyer proposed,

"reform" meant both rationalizing and extending the system fur-

ther, filling in the gaps between the homes and streets where pris-

oners come from, and the state cages where they serve time, with

an assortment of community and county-based surveillance, cus-

tody, punishment, and treatment structures and programs

(PRCC 1996). The vertical integration envisioned in the reform

plan returned the responsibility for dealing with certain types of

convictions, such as drugs, routinely committed as felons to the

CDC, back to local law enforcement, promising that Sacramento

would foot the bill, at least at the outset.33 The CDC's average

daily cost of keeping a prisoner in the system has hovered around

$s 9 ; Lockyer intended to give that amount to local and county ju-

risdictions that come up with plans for dealing with people who

124 THE PRISON FIX

might be supervised outside CDC facilities. There was an incen-

tive; successful jurisdictions would not need to spend the full $s9

per prisoner retained. Thus, if a prisoner were sentenced to a

program of drug testing and day reporting, at a daily cost of$12

for staff, equipment, and facilities, the jurisdiction could keep the

balance and use it for whatever law enforcement needs it might

have (PRCC 1996).34

While the Lockyer plan seemed to promise an end to the end-

less expansion of prison cells, it still depended on forecasts of

ever-growing numbers of criminals eligible for the lockup. The

plan also called for construction of two more state facilities (E. G.

Hill 1996, in PRCC 1996). The plan also recapitulated, at the

state level, the ways and means that federal programs, from wel-

fare to crime control, are being pushed down the political scale

with near-term funds attached. In the case of crime, legal, fiscal,

and programmatic linkages form an unbroken criminalization

armature across every conceivable landscape of the future. In

other words, surplus and crisis reemerged, at this conjuncture, in

the form of too many prisoners on the one hand-products of the

earlier surpluses-and on the other, a changing sense of the

CDC's ongoing legitimation to expand, rather than simply re-

fine, technologies of incarceration.

For Dan Boatwright, who "termed out" of the Senate at the

end of 1996, and other fiscal conservatives in the legislature, pri-

vatization was the proper route to take. In April 1996, the Sen-

ate held hearings on SB 2156, a bill to establish a "Correctional

Facilities Privatization Commission" to sell bonds to build pri-

vate prisons, and to lease private space for prisoners (SB 2156,

April 16, 1996). Those in attendance to support privatization in-

cluded representatives from the United States' largest prison op-

THE PRISON FIX 125

erators in the private sector: Wackenhut and Corrections Cor-

poration of America, both of which hired former state employ-

ees to lobby Sacramento (Morain 1994c). When the bill got to the

Senate floor later in the spring, it failed to pass, because, accord-

ing to one observer, the "Republicans did not line up" -perhaps

because the CCPOA had registered its unalterable opposition to

privatization.35 The CCPOA feared, rightly, that if the private

sector were brought in, the new guards would be low-wage,

nonunion workers, as is the case throughout the private security

industry (Greene 2001; cf. Christie 1993). The guards published their own plan, titled Meeting the Chal-

lenge of Affordable Prisons: A Plan to Reduce the Cost of Building

and Operating California Prisons to Ensure Incarceration of Violent

and Habitual Offenders without Bankrupting Taxpayers (CCPOA

n.d. [1996]). The report's long title managed to condense, onto a

bright red cover, all the key words in mainstream prison debate.

The CCPOA's plan was to build "megaprisons" 36

that would

each hold 20,000 people-up from the 2,500-6,000. The

megaprisons would be built where there were already prisons-

in places such as Delano and Corcoran-creating intensive dis-

tricts (of which there are already several, although none so big as

those proposed). Prisoners would do much of the building, thus

saving labor costs. And, finally, the state would continue to fund

prisons using LRBs, in the name of fiscal efficiency (CCPOA n.d.

[1996]).

CONCLUSION

California began to come apart during the world recession of

1 9 73-75. After a false boom in the late 1970s, fueled by federal

outlays that created jobs in both the military and aerospace in-

126 THE PRISON FIX

dustries and at the community level, California entered a new

phase of political and economic restructuring in the early 1980s,

during which time the bifurcation between rich and poor deep-

ened and widened. While profits rose, capital's need for new in-

fusions of investment dollars was increasingly met out of re-

tained earnings. Deep reductions in well-waged urban jobs that

had employed modestly educated men of color-especially

African Americans and Chicanos-overlapped with changes in

rural industrial processes and a long drought. These forces pro-

duced surpluses of capital, labor, and land, which the state, suf-

fering a prolonged period of delegitimation, manifested in the

taxpayers' revolts, could not put back to work under its declin-

ing military Keynesian aegis (cf. Hall and Schwarz 1988). How-

ever, by renovating and making "critical already-existing activi-

ties" (Gramsci 1971: 330-31), power blocs in Sacramento and

elsewhere throughout California did recombine these sur-

pluses-and mixed them with the state's aggressive capacity to

act-by embarking on the biggest prison construction program

in the history of the world.

What has happened to each component, each surplus in this

story? Have their crises been resolved? Finance capitalists

achieved what they were after by issuing $s billion in bonds for new prison construction, with more issues in the wings; while

they did not make any more money than if they had raised the

funds by precisely the same means to build schools or parks or

anything else, state capacity to issue debt was circumscribed by

defensible categories as (and through which) the role of govern-

ment changed. Landowners concentrated in the agricultural

counties have divested themselves of surplus acreage and

brought in the state as local employer and local government sub-

THE PRISON FIX 127

sidizer. Labor remained divided, by race, region, and income-

while "taxpayers," who themselves are mostly working people,

used polling booth power inconsistently-sometimes but not al-

ways against "stranded communities" (Jacqueline Jones 1992) of

under- and unemployed people of color and white people who

have the highest risk of spending time in prison. Voter vagaries

suggest that even politician- and media-fueled fear embodies

contradictions, especially as prison and felony expansion touch

more and more households that once might have believed them-

selves immune. Did the new power blocs achieve total, unques-

tioned legitimacy? 37 The answer is embedded in the kinds of

practices this operationalization of state capacity have produced.

The JLCPCO was disbanded in November 2003. Yet there is no

end in sight for the elaborate, expensive, and constantly multi-

plied apparatuses of coercion and control developed in harmony

with, and sometimes by the makers of, the weapons of destruc-

tion produced for hot and cold warfare throughout the twenti-

6 G ,. )38

eth century (cf. Bartov 199 ; uenn 1994 ·