State Shouldn't Backpedal on Prison Reform

There is a nervousness looming in California. The Golden State passed Proposition 47 last November – which reduced the penalty for certain nonviolent drug and theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors – with a vote of nearly 60 percent approval.

Prop. 47 represents a win-win for California. The cost savings from an estimated 40,000 fewer charges per year would mean more money for schools and drug rehabilitation programs, as well as a reduction in the overcrowding that has characterized California’s prisons since the 1970s.

Now, some proponents of Prop. 47 are resting uneasy – burglaries and thefts have recently risen in areas like Los Angeles where drug arrests have plummeted. Drug addicts have failed to enter treatment programs as was hoped, and some are concerned with releasing inmates into society, regardless of their offense. The apparent increase in burglaries and thefts is understandably a cause for concern, but California should not backpedal on positive prison reform.

Prop. 47 provides cost savings and reduces crowding, but its long-term benefits are found below the surface. Prop. 47 begins to address a deeply rooted cause of prison violence and corruption that has plagued California for decades: the brutal, yet highly organized hierarchy of prison gangs that facilitates the drug trade within prisons. Gangs are a dominant force in the penal system.

The United States is the only high-income Western country where prison gangs wield the level of control that they do in states like California – where prisons operate at nearly 140 percent of their designed capacity. This crowding has grisly effects. From 2001-12, 162 Californian inmates were killed at the hands of other prisoners, which is twice the national average.Violence is a direct result of the prison gangs that emerge as a way to control inmates and reduce conflict.

Overcrowding and the simultaneous rise of prison gangs aren’t coincidental: Gangs arise to address specific problems in the inmate social system. With the expansion of incarceration, race riots and violence began to dominate California’s prisons.

Gangs create an internal system of governance behind bars, where violence often goes unchecked and prison personnel are greatly outnumbered. Prison gangs offer protection to inmates and access to illicit trade. A number of notorious prison gangs formed in the ’60s and early ’70s, including the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerilla Family and the Mexican Mafia.

Gangs also nurture an underground drug trade that grows alongside increasing prison populations. Locking up drug users shifts their demand behind bars. In 2009, there were 50 times as many inmates in California prisons for drug offenses than there were in 1951. And as the prison population and demand for drugs behind bars grows, so do the inmates’ ability to organize a network of drug trade.

By 2002, 83 percent of inmates in America were heavily involved with alcohol or drugs. In 2013, 23 percent of randomly selected inmates tested positive for drugs, and another 30 percent refused to take the test. The illicit trade is booming, and prison gangs – which often have detailed written constitutions and procedures – are at the center of it all.

If prison reform is to be effective, it must dismantle the incentives for prison gangs to form.

Fixing a broken prison system cannot be achieved through increasing incarceration and strengthening prison gangs. Prop. 47 is a good first step on the road to reducing prison populations and liberalizing nonviolent drug offenses that, in time, will undermine the importance of prison gangs.