In 2020, after the tragic murder of George Floyd, there was a moment when it seemed that the United States, including California, was ready to reform our broken and discriminatory criminal justice system.
In 2024, when the California Legislature returns from its vacation, criminal justice will once again be at the forefront. But now, the proverbial pendulum has swung and a new era of tough-on-crime seems to be emerging between the cracks of our good intentions.
Proposition 47, which helped reduce California’s prison population by changing certain nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, is likely to be repealed, if not nullified, this year.
The California Highway Patrol has been called in to stop retail theft, even though no one is completely sure how big the problem is.
Drug dealers are being charged with murder as fentanyl overdose deaths continue to rise, a new tactic in a new war on drugs, little different from the one that led to the overincarceration of Black and brown people during the epidemic. crack of the 80s, when he insisted that we could escape poverty and addiction.
It is a worrying change in both attitude and reform that, as history has shown, will not lead to the safer communities we all want.
But what is about to happen inside San Quentin State Prison has the potential to fundamentally change crime and punishment in the Golden State and beyond.
Because as much as we want to believe that just one law, more police, or a harsher sentence can protect us, the truth is that the best way to reduce crime is to prevent it from happening in the first place, not with the punishing fist that has been decades has left us with jails and prisons where more than a third of people return within a few years of being released.
But instead, we help people find other paths and give them opportunities to survive in ways that uplift rather than take advantage of our communities, an approach with proven results both in the U.S. and in other countries, where Decades ago incarceration embraced rehabilitation not as an option. but a mandate.
Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he wanted to transform San Quentin, California’s oldest and most famous prison, into a new type of correctional facility inspired by Scandinavian rehabilitation principles, where the mandate to change lives is written into law.
With his love for slogans, he nicknamed it Model California and left the details for later. A long-awaited explanation of what the California Model will look like in practice was released Friday, providing both an ideal and a model for what is a radical, subversive and important change in what it means to be in prison.
“This is a big deal,” Darrell Steinberg told me. He helped chair the committee that created the recommendations and is mayor of Sacramento, a city as affected as any other by the drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness that have driven much of the changing attitudes around crime. . That’s why he knows as well as anyone that voters want results, not experiments.
“This will improve public safety for the obvious reason that when people have the tools to succeed on the outside, they will have a better life and will be much less likely to commit another crime,” he said.
It’s visionary, he said, but also feasible.
A central part of the transition involves changing corrections officers’ jobs from enforcers and adversaries to participants in rehabilitation, a metamorphosis that the union representing corrections officers supports. Under the plan, officers would take college-level classes on trauma-informed practices and would be expected to interact with inmates as mentors and guides.
San Quentin itself would also receive a renovation, albeit restricted by our current economic realities. The cramped cells that currently hold two people in 46 square feet, about half the size of a decent bathroom, would be eliminated to allow for single-occupancy spaces that Steinberg said are the minimum demands for dignity.
Corrections officials would also see an improvement. Housing prices are so high in Marin County, where San Quentin is located, that many find it impossible to live close enough for a daily shift (a two-bedroom home averages more than $3,000 a month), which leaves them with hours-long trips.
Because of this, some officers have resorted to “dry camping” in trailers with homeless-like conditions that lack running water, electricity or even sewage. They are cramming a week’s work into a few days just to survive. The new plan would give correctional officers a camp with basic facilities and access to showers and safe spaces to relax, perhaps making the job less stressful.
For incarcerated people, the change will mean that on the first day of their sentences there will be a coordinated effort to organize services: mental health care, education, job training and substance abuse treatment. And that there are people to implement those plans and support them.
While that seems basic, it doesn’t happen now. People are largely left to their own devices to navigate an opaque and inefficient system that is so archaic that parts of it are not even computerized. Waiting lists are long and information can be difficult to obtain.
If the ideas laid out in the plan make it through upcoming budget negotiations (in a year with a large and unexpected deficit), it will be a cultural shift inside the most infamous prison in the country’s second-largest state prison system (Texas is the only state with a larger prison population).
Although taking the California Model from paper to practice is years in the making, the proposal for San Quentin has the potential to be the largest and most significant criminal justice reform in decades, if we do it right, which of course always is. a question. It’s about the government.
But it’s a big change with the potential for real benefits, not knee-jerk anger and fear at proposals like gutting Proposition 47, which will only repeat the mistakes of the past.
There will always be predators and there will always be crimes. And it’s true that it all sounds touchy-feely and nebulous, like we’re about to spend a lot of money holding hands with criminals while they talk about their childhood and get their GED.
And to be honest, that’s part of it, something we shouldn’t ignore.
At its core, the California Model is about dignity and compassion, creating policies around the belief that healing is not just for the innocent and is not soft.
Fixing humans, especially those who are broken enough to hurt others, is the most difficult task.
But it can be done.
And if California makes San Quentin a place where that happens, we’ll all be safer.
