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nuclear program. A major roadblock has been Washington’s refusal to acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich uranium for civil- ian purposes, in exchange for the latter’s agreement to more stringent international inspections. Russia, a key ally of Iran’s, and China, a major buyer of Iranian oil, could help coax Iran to accept a deal along those lines if Obama were to offer it. Here, perhaps more than on any other foreign policy issue, domestic pressure from hawks, neoconservatives and the Israel lobby has convinced the White House to slow-walk the talks with Iran.

Parallel to its missteps there and in Syria, the administration has not yet seemed to grasp the tectonic shifts brought about by the Arab Spring. Dictatorships were overthrown in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya—though not in Bahrain, where a rebellion was suppressed with tacit support from Washington—but all three countries are now in turmoil . Too often, the administration has ignored the region’s underlying problems—food and water shortages and vast poverty, in addition to autocracy—while seem- ing to take sides in the Sunni-Shiite conflict by backing Saudi Arabia and its allies against Iran and Shiite Arab forces.

In Latin America, Obama has intensified US involvement, in what Biden called “the most active stretch of high-level engage- ment on Latin America in a long, long time.” The president visited Mexico and Costa Rica this year, arranged meetings with the presidents of Chile and Peru in Washington in June, and dispatched Biden to Brazil and Colombia. In the past, the administration saw regional policy through the lens of drug trafficking and immigration. Obama has recently shifted his focus to economics, telling the president of Costa Rica that drug violence and immigration problems arise “because of [regional] poverty [and] because young people don’t see a brighter future ahead.” Yet the administration has built its approach chiefly around a neoliberal trade policy, highlighted by the Trans Pacific Partnership, currently in negotiation. The TPP seems designed not only to enhance corporate power but to counter China’s

growing clout in both the Pacific and Latin America. One of the most glaring weaknesses of the Obama administra-

tion is the president’s inaction on global warming. In his State of the Union address, Obama invoked Superstorm Sandy, wildfires and drought as evidence that climate change was worsening. Still, in his dealings with world powers like China, emerging as the world’s greatest polluter, Obama has yet to make it a priority, and he has abandoned international forums designed to cope with the crisis. Kerry and Hagel have also downplayed the issue.

The area of least progress is Israel-Palestine. Since 2009, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rudely rebuffed Obama’s demand for a halt to settlement growth in the occupied West Bank, the White House has virtually ignored the issue. In the spring, Kerry revived US support for Saudi Arabia’s 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which all the Arab states promised to recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations if it withdrew from the occupied territories and agreed to an equitable resolution of the refugee issue; and he proposed a $4 billion development plan for the West Bank, which he touted as the start of an intensive diplomatic push to renew talks. But progress seems unlikely. “The Arab peace plan goes back eleven years,” says Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East expert at Columbia University. “It was ignored then, and it will be ignored again. The Israelis won’t have anything to do with it.” Khalidi says that domestic pressures from AIPAC and its allies in Congress will continue to thwart any diplomatic effort by Obama.

With the White House facing Republican stonewalling in Congress, you’d think foreign policy, where the president has a freer hand, would be one area where Obama could make a mark during his second term. Most observers believe that Obama sees his legacy primarily in terms of domestic accom- plishments, including healthcare reform and pulling the econ- omy out of recession. But as events have shown, he neglects world affairs at his—and the country’s—peril. ■

O n February 22, 1998, Pete Gallagher arrived at Build- ing 13 at Solano State Prison in Vacaville, California. It was Gallagher’s thirteenth year behind bars, and he’d already done time in Chino, Folsom, San Quentin and, most recently, the Richard J. Donovan Correctional

Facility outside San Diego. Building 13 was large, open, fluorescent-lit and crammed with double bunks. Inmates were everywhere. It reminded Gallagher of a warehouse or a military barracks. He took one look, then found a corrections officer. “I’m not going to live like this,” he told him. “Take me to the hole.”

But for the next fourteen years, Gallagher, who is on parole and did not want his real name used, did live like that, and he

watched as conditions deteriorated further: triple bunks replaced doubles, and new bodies filled the new beds. No toilets or sinks were added. The law library became too cramped to use, and visit- ing hours were chaos. Men died from the miserable healthcare: one from an abscessed tooth, another from hepatitis C. “If you weren’t ambulatory, you didn’t go to the doctor,” Gallagher says.

By 2006, the California prison system had reached a crisis point: built to house 80,000 inmates, it held more than twice that number. “It was like the USSR,” says Jim Mayer, execu- tive director of California Forward, a nonpartisan government reform group. “It was going to implode on itself.” A few years later, a three-judge panel handed down a dramatic ruling in response to two federal class-action lawsuits filed by inmates: the first, from 1990, claimed that mentally ill prisoners did not

California’s Great Prison Experiment The state faces a deadline to release tens of thousands of people from prison. Is it succeeding? by TIM STELLOH

Tim Stelloh is a freelance writer based in New York.

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have access to minimal care; the second, filed eleven years later, described similar conditions for regular medical treatment. The panel found that inmates had been subject to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The judges ordered California to shrink its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. The state appealed, but on May 23, 2011, the US Supreme Court upheld the order in a land- mark ruling, Brown v. Plata. By June 27, 2013, the Court ruled, California’s prisons would have to look very different.

So began “realignment,” an unprecedented overhaul of California’s thirty-three prisons, described as the largest criminal justice experiment ever conducted in America. Tens of thousands of low-level offenders would be kept in their hometowns instead of being shipped to state prisons. Law enforcement would seek smarter, cheaper justice models. That, at least, was the theory. And while the Court’s deadline has since been pushed from June to December, the question remains: Is California doing enough to reverse its prison crisis?

F ive months before the Plata rul- ing, in December 2010, California Governor-elect Jerry Brown sum- moned law enforcement officials to a conference room in Sacramento.

It was his last month as attorney general, and for the second time in his career—he was also governor from 1975 to 1983— he was preparing to be inaugurated. As police and probation chiefs, district attor- neys and others crowded around a confer- ence table, Brown laid out the state’s most urgent criminal justice problems: a $26 billion deficit and a looming Supreme Court decision that could have vast impli- cations. Then he introduced the broad outlines of a plan that would transform the state’s prison system.

It was ironic that Brown was delivering this policy initiative. During his earlier terms as governor, he had overseen a very dif- ferent kind of transformation of the prison system. Soon after his election in 1974 and into the next three decades, punishment flourished: the state passed a slew of tough sentencing measures, including, in 1994, the notorious three-strikes law (recently soft- ened by a ballot measure). Rehabilitation programs were gutted. The prison guard union—and its political power—exploded, the “war on drugs” was declared, and as Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon has pointed out, a new generation of parole offi- cers with little interest in rehabilitation sent waves of offenders back to prison for so-called technical violations. Between 1984 and 2006, California built twenty-one new prisons and, in roughly the same period, increased its prison population from 34,000 to 173,000 prisoners. The racial composition of the inmate popula- tion shifted from largely white to largely black, and the number of people incarcerated for drug sales and possession charges tripled. Corrections dollars from the state’s general fund quadrupled. One study found that within three years, 66 percent of parolees had returned to prison. Even Brown, whose office did not respond to requests for an interview, called the system a “scandal.”

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003,

he promised systemic changes. A panel of experts developed rec- ommendations, beginning with a reduction in overcrowding, as well as a variety of rehabilitative programs. “Rehabilitation” was even added to the state corrections agency’s name.

But as Stanford University law professor Joan Petersilia has pointed out, Schwarzenegger largely failed. He signed a bill that funded one of the largest prison and jail construction programs in state history. The cost of housing inmates rose, as did the prison population. Meanwhile, investments that might eventually reduce incarceration—toward things like educa- tion or substance abuse treatment—remained pitifully low: just $2,000 of every $49,500 spent annually to house a single inmate funded rehabilitation.

On February 14, 2006, a district court judge appointed a federal receiver to take over the delivery of inmate healthcare. Behind the ruling was a startlingly bleak portrait of the prison system—one filled with feckless administrators, negligent

doctors, and inmates who were dying at the alarming rate of one every six to seven days. One doctor refused to see a prisoner who was experiencing abdominal and chest pains. The inmate died two weeks later, and the physician, who was the subject of sixty-two grievances, later said that most prisoners with medical complaints were trying to take advantage of the system. “By all accounts, the California prison medical system is bro- ken beyond repair,” the judge wrote. “The harm already done in this case to California’s prison inmate population could not be more grave, and the threat of future injury and

death is virtually guaranteed in the absence of drastic action.” A few years later, and just three months after Brown’s

December 2010 meeting, his plan for such drastic action would become law. It acknowledged decades of failed prison policy, and though it didn’t roll back some of the state’s toughest sentencing laws, as prison reformers had advocated, it offered a vision that was in stark contrast to the tough-on-crime years. “The law set out a statement of findings and legislative intent that read as though, literally, the ACLU might have written them,” says Allen Hopper, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

B y the fall of 2011, Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones was frustrated. He wasn’t necessarily opposed to Brown’s ideas, but everything had happened too fast. He feared that prisoners would be released with little supervision, and told a reporter, “You add to that the statistical cer-

tainty of our recidivism rate, I think you can fairly well…predict that the crime rate in Sacramento County is going to go up.” A little farther south, the Los Angeles district attorney, Steve Cooley, was less circumspect. “Like a lot of revolutions,” he told a radio reporter, “there might be a lot of blood in the streets.”

For all the fearmongering, realignment has proven to be a relatively peaceful experiment so far. There was a slight uptick in violent and property crimes in the first half of 2012 in most of California’s largest cities, according to the nonpartisan

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Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, yet an analysis earlier this year by the center found no connection between those numbers and realignment. Many counties that once sent felons to state prison en masse have dramatically scaled back those numbers. All told, the state’s prison population has shrunk by more than 25,000 inmates since 2011.

Like deinstitutionalization, the decades-long process that returned mentally ill people from psychiatric hospitals to com- munities, realignment was designed to keep thousands of thieves, addicts, and other “nonsexual, nonserious and nonviolent” inmates—as the state calls them—in their home counties. Instead of sending offenders to state prison, local law enforcement would figure out what to do with them: Should they be monitored with an ankle bracelet? Should they be in drug or alcohol treatment? Parolees would no longer be sent back to prison for technical violations, and judges and prosecutors would have more discre- tion in sentencing and charging low-level criminals.

Realignment called for “evidence-based” corrections practices that cost less than prison, but there were no mandates to prove such practices were working. Counties were given wide latitude to decide how to implement the law. “The coun- ties know how to run their business” is how Terri McDonald, undersecretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, explains it.

In the months after the law passed, research- ers at the ACLU of Northern California began reviewing every realignment plan from every county. While many of these counties professed a commitment to the principles laid out in the law, their plans contradicted its spirit: of the twenty-five counties that received the most state realignment funding, twenty-four planned to expand their jails or build new ones. “At its worst,” the ACLU warned a few months later, “realignment will reveal itself to be nothing more than a shell game, simply moving bodies out of California’s dangerously and unconstitutionally overcrowded prisons to local jail facilities.”

Was California’s county-empowering reform little more than the old mass incarceration model writ small?

O ne day last December, 45-year-old Bart Cantrell got up around 4 am and marched down a fluorescent-lit hall- way, through the kitchen, and into a small room where a little black machine and a cylindrical magnet sat on a metal shelf. As he did every day, he swiped the magnet

across a black monitor strapped to his ankle and watched for a green light. Seconds later, Cantrell’s blood-alcohol level was measured and the authorities notified.

Cantrell had been an oilfield worker, truck driver and com- mercial fisherman, and had once lived in a half-million-dollar home. By the time I met him, he lived in a small room in a former motel on the dusty edges of Bakersfield, an oil and agricultural city at the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley. The facility had reopened as the New Life Recovery and Training Center last year. Cantrell was there because he had been using methamphetamine and other drugs since he was 14. After decades of cycling through county jail and state prison, he was done. His ex-wife was dead— killed by an overdose. He’d lost his house. “I’m to the point where

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he told me. Kern County, where Cantrell lived, is mostly rural and was

once known for its lock-’em-up philosophy. The county jail, which holds about 2,700 people, is one of eighteen in the state now operating under a court-ordered population cap. Before realignment, it had a recidivism rate of 70 percent, and about three-quarters of the people sent to state prison were low- level felons. Kern County Sheriff Chief Deputy Francis Moore explains the old thinking this way: “We’re the cops—we put them in jail, we house them while they’re in jail, then we kick them out the door. What happens out the door… who cares?”

Last year, Cantrell faced a maximum of fourteen years in prison on drug charges. But under realignment, after serving six months in jail, he started renting a room at New Life with the monitor strapped to one ankle and a GPS device strapped to the other. Cantrell was one of more than a thousand people who, by last December, were enrolled in the Kern County sheriff’s “virtual jail,” a combination of programs created or dramatically expanded under realignment. Today, the county jail is “almost like a re-entry center,” according to Lt. Gregory Gonzales of

the sheriff’s office. “Everybody we’re talking to, we’re trying to figure out: How can we get you to not come back next year?”

As a result, the jail now offers classes on domestic violence and food safety. There’s a new drug program and an expanded GED course. Inmates found not to pose a risk to the community are released with monitors. A sheriff’s supervision program has more than quadrupled in size. Centers like New Life have received state funding to expand their services, and the probation department has doubled the size of a day reporting center that offers counsel- ing, job training, parenting classes and more.

For people like Cantrell, effective rehabilitation programs can mean the difference between returning to a cell or not. Yet such spending in Kern County represents just a sliver of its realignment budget: only 15 percent of the county’s nearly $11 million in state funds for 2011 and 2012 were set aside for these programs, according to data collected by researchers at Stanford Law School’s Criminal Justice Center.

Moore argues that Kern County doesn’t need to spend more on rehabilitation. If prisoners “fail the programs and we have no jail beds to send them back to for failing, what’s their incentive to be successful?” he says. The county is expand- ing its jail system with a $120 million, 700-bed facility that is expected to open in 2017.

Kern County is far from unusual in its approach. Most coun- ties set aside less than 20 percent of their new state money for rehabilitation, according to the Stanford data. Fifteen counties budgeted nothing. Instead, they retrofitted jails, refurbished beds and hired deputies to staff those jails, along with other traditional law enforcement expenditures, says Petersilia.

Many counties that once sent felons to state prison en masse have dramatically scaled back those numbers.

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CAP’s staff advocated for First Solar before Congress and in articles on CAP’s website without disclosing that pertinent piece of information.

Maybe the 6 percent figure for corporate contributions is true ; but we have only CAP’s word for it. It should publish and make avail- able an annual report or otherwise disclose at least some basic financial information, as most major think tanks do. Furthermore, if CAP gets only 6 percent of its budget from corporations, that’s purely a function of its failure to close the deal, not for lack of try- ing (see the wonderful perks it offers to big corporate donors, as I describe in the article).

It’s good that CAP sometimes criticizes its donors, but I found numerous instances where it praised them. But that’s not the point. Wall Street companies gave a lot of money to President Obama not because they expected his support all the time, but to get more than they would if they gave him no money (I’d say they got a pretty good return on their investment). I expect that’s the same impulse that prompts com- panies to give CAP money, unless you be- lieve the explanation Boeing gave me that its contributions are purely “educational in

nature.” Oh, yeah, and Chris Belisle, whom Purse dismisses as a “junior staffer,” mys- teriously had the title “senior manager” of CAP’s Business Alliance. Ken Silverstein

Gore Vidal Lives!—On e-Book

Oakland, Calif. I thank The Nation for making Gore Vidal’s State of the Union: Nation Essays 1958– 2005 available as an e-book. I’ve gotten through Richard Lingeman’s introduc- tion and Victor Navasky’s foreword and am unable to resist sharing an observa- tion. As the son of a mathematician father and journalist mother, my heart belongs to words, but my head to numbers. My mother always said there was never any- one in the newsroom who could do even the most basic arithmetic calculations. Reading these two pieces together, one’s heart is gladdened to see that this tradi- tion is upheld at The Nation, where no one seems to be able to divide 50,000 by 25. Bruce Boer

The point remains that the wily and parsi- monious Victor S. Navasky was able to get

Vidal to write for The Nation for pennies on the dollar of what he was offered (and refused) elsewhere, as readers will see when they read Lingeman’s and Navasky’s ver- sions of the tale. To purchase the Gore Vidal e-book (for pennies on the dollar), visit TheNation.com/ebooks. —The Editors

Art Appreciation and a Correction

Alert readers and art buffs undoubtedly rec- ognized that last issue’s cover illustration was a reproduction of Eugène Dela croix’s Liberty Leading the People, which celebrates the July 1830 revolution in France.

In David Cole’s “The AP’s Privacy, and Ours” [ June 10/17], the first two sentences of the paragraph starting at the bottom of the left column on page 5 should have read: “Since the Supreme Court has essentially bowed out, our protections depend on Con- gress. Current law requires, for example, that the government obtain a court order that evidence is relevant to a criminal inves- tigation in order to obtain real-time phone records of whom one calls and for how long. It imposes a somewhat higher standard, re- quiring ‘specific and articulable facts,’ for stored e-mail addressing data.”

Letters (continued from page 2)

Do these numbers confirm the ACLU’s warning? Petersilia says they do—but only up to a point. “The sheriffs were the knee-jerk reaction,” she says. “When nobody else had a plan, they had built facilities. They were right there at the ready.” Despite that initial binge in jail spending, a closer look at Stanford’s research reveals a recent shift: counties are beginning to use the money as it was intended.

For Cantrell, that shift offered a bit of hope. He had seven months of sobriety, and he believed facilities like New Life were critical to keeping people like him out of a cell. “If a guy is seri- ous and he wants to do something and wants to change, they provide an atmosphere for that,” he told me. Sadly, for Cantrell, that chance was fleeting. One morning in February, a few days before his birthday, a truck ran a stop sign and collided with his vehicle. Cantrell died at the scene.

T oday in Sacramento, Jerry Brown insists that his state’s prison crisis is long gone. In January, state lawyers filed documents in federal court challenging the population reduction order, arguing that federal authorities should stop meddling with the prison system’s health services.

“We’ve gone from serious constitutional problems to one of the finest prison systems in the United States,” Brown said at a press conference in January. He called the reduction goal “arbitrary,” dismissing federal oversight as benefiting “people who fly across the continent” to “denounce how bad everything is.”

But lawyers for the class-action plaintiffs say that lethally inadequate medical care is still a problem. Raymond Patterson, the court-appointed expert charged with evaluating suicides, points out that in 2012 the rate of inmate suicides was twenty- four per 100,000—considerably higher than the national average and on par with a decade ago. In his last annual report, filed in federal court in March, Patterson concluded that a large number of those deaths were preventable. He has written more than a dozen such reports, and virtually none of his recommendations have been followed. So he ended with a farewell: “It has become apparent that continued repetition of these recommendations would be a further waste of time and effort,” he wrote.

Then there are the nearly 9,000 prisoners who remain in five out-of-state facilities run by Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company. The cost of incarceration has continued to rise—to almost $52,000 per person annually —while rehabilitation funding has plummeted from the Schwarzenegger era, to just over $1,000 per year for 2011 and 2012.

Criminologist James Austin describes the effect of realign- ment thus far as “not insignificant.” Still, he says, to meet the reduction goal, the state must reckon with the tens of thousands of other inmates who likely pose little risk to their communities but remain incarcerated under harsh sentencing rules. These include many lifers and aging inmates convicted of violent crimes. “If you look at the prison system, that’s what’s wrong,” Austin says. “There are a lot of low-risk people in there.” ■

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