Newsom closed 5 prisons in California. Why lawmakers can shut down more

from Adam AshtonCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

At the time when the governor Gavin Newsom leaves office, California will have five fewer state prisons than when he came to power.

Some California state lawmakers want to make it six.

They point to a new analysis that shows the state’s prison population has declined so dramatically that California could close another prison and still have capacity for the 90,000 or more people currently incarcerated.

That report prompted pointed questions for California Prisons Secretary Jeffrey Macomber at a budget hearing last week. Legislators anticipate tight budgets if not deficits in the coming years, and the Newsom administration estimates that closing prisons saves about $150 million a year.

Sen. Laura Richardson told Macomber she would prefer to keep inmates in cramped quarters, such as two-person cells, if it meant saving money that could be used to help people in need.

“If I had to choose between two prisoners who are bicellularwhich is allowed and has been done for many, many years, compared to being able to provide health care to citizens, to non-citizens, to people who live in the state of California, I would obviously be wrong on that,” said Richardson, a Democrat who represents Inglewood.

The debate is possible because California prisons hold about 70,000 fewer people than in 2011, when severe overcrowding and court orders forced the Legislature to create a plan to reduce that number.

Today, the system is under a court order to limit its inmate population to 137.5% of capacity. The Legislative Analyst’s Office reported last month that prisons have room for 98,000 people, meaning the Department of Corrections has about 8,000 more beds than needed.

“Reducing the number of empty beds in service by closing an additional prison would allow significant savings,” the report said.

The analyst’s office recommended lawmakers reject major infrastructure improvements at prisons that could be closed. He named a Monterey County jail, known as the Correctional Training Facility, as a jail to consider closing in part because it needs expensive repairs.

The next closed prison is the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco of Riverside County which is expected to close by October. Prior to that, the Newsom administration closed prisons in the Blythe near the Arizona borderTracy in San Joaquin County, Susanville in rural Lassen County. The state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County, a facility now operated as immigration detention center.

The Newsom administration expects to spend $18 billion on prisons next year, an amount essentially unchanged since 2024. Prisons Secretary Macomber said during the budget hearing that the department accounts for about 5.6 percent of the state budget, down from 10 percent a decade ago.

Macomber told Sen. Richardson that closing a prison could create challenges for corrections staff and inmates. For example, he said each jail receives about 100 inmates every time the state closes a facility, which can cause a backlog in rehabilitation programs.

It also limits space for programming and for initiatives that would give inmates a place to prepare for life after prison, such as providing single-person cells.

“The downside of closing prisons is that it affects public safety,” Macomber said.
“The people in this prison that’s closing, the inmates, they’re not coming home. I’m moving them to other prisons. They’re getting on waiting lists for rehab and programming. We’re adding more overcrowding, more double cells, more challenges.

“If we want to reinvent our system, we need more interaction, more rehabilitation programs for our population,” he said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.