Research bleg 2:
Well, my first research bleg kind of came up a bust, but maybe I'll have better luck on this one. My understanding is the prison guards union in California pushes for tougher criminal law. (1) Do prison guards unions do this in places other than California? (2) Are prison systems themselves, perhaps Departments of Corrections?, also active in lobbying for tougher criminal law or enforcement, either openly or behind the scenes?
Two cynical reasons corrections officers might lobby for harsher sentencing: (1) It ever so slightly dilutes the scumminess of the populations they deal with, since more intense enforcement sets a lower bar on the nastiness of those who will be incarcerated/supervised; and (2) More prisoners creates a greater demand for correctional officers which slightly increases the power of correctional unions.
However, my impression - gained from occassionally working on research with correctional officers - is that those guards and POs who are not burned out usually develop a definite sense that the public REALLY needs protection from the people they supervise and that the more of these people who are under correctional supervision the better. Constantly working with inmates gives one a real sense of how truly bad news most unincarcerated criminals are for ordinary citizens and how truly EVIL a significant minority are. If Norman Mailer's liberal hubris had not led him to ignore this knowledge, a promising young man might have grown into a talented writer.
You may be correct on their motivations; but be careful in trusting their judgment.
I have a cousin who is a prison guard and I'll try to see if he has any helpful information.
Well, as long as we're being nonresponsive ... of course they do. Like they want to be put out of work?
However, it was a tangetial point, so I didn't spend enough time chasing it down to say definitively that California is unique in this respect. However, it was clear from my limited research that, if such lobbying occurs in other states, nowhere is it as widespread or intense as in California.
I assume you are already aware of Justice Kennedy's comments to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference this year when he called such lobbying "sick".
I don't think that's obvious at all. It's not like our prisons are in danger of becoming empty under current sentencing laws.
Tougher sentencing would tend to increase overcrowding. That could be good for prison guards if it gets new prisons built, it could also be bad if it endangers their safety. It would be interesting to find out if there's a consensus among unions nationwide.
My experience was that our Corrections officials really wanted to get more people out of their prisons. The budget pressuers on them are enormous. Even more than most states, I suspect, Louisiana hates to spend tax money on prisons, so our Corrections officers are paid very low. Combine that with miserable working conditions, and you've got a recipe for very high turn-over and constant recruitment issues.
Also, I found that many of our wardens would develop almost a soft spot for inmates, at least the ones who behaved themselves. Several times, a warden would chime in favorable on an inmate's application for clemency. I would always ask, did you know that they did X, Y, and Z? The answer was always nope, and never mind then. They focused, as they must, on the inmate's behavior in prison, not what he did to get there.
Several times, I observed Corrections working closely with members of the black caucus in our legislature to hammer out the details of early release policies, such as for non-violent drug offenders and elderly, ill inmates. Corrections' concerns were generally to make sure that a policy was going to practical and wouldn't leave them holding the bag if the released inmate committed more crimes, and they wanted to protect their level of funding.
As a political force, Corrections really didn't have a strong position one way or the other on such matters. They would generally side with the DAs and the Sheriffs, but mostly out of political convenience or inertia than anything else, I think; they weren't the driving force.
Sasha, I'd be happy to provide you whatever information I can to help; e-mail me to discuss it more.
P.S. The real political force for higher rates of imprisonment here are local sheriffs. When the state prisons are too full (always the case), the overflow are sent to local jails, with the state paying a per diem. That's a real money-maker for the local sheriffs, and there was a lot of lobbying over funding for new local jails, and who got how many prisoners. Lobbying for tougher sentences (not that our legislature needs much lobbying for that) was a win-win for sheriffs. More criminals off the street, for longer periods of time, and more money for the sheriff to hire more deputies and buy fancy equipment to play with.
That is somewhat true, although most local jails across the country do not have room for overflow from the state prisons. However private prisons do benefit greatly as do states with excess capacity as other states pay them to house prisoners.
We've had generally bad experiences with private prisons. We've still got a few, but most have not worked well at all.
Of course I agree. Does anything I've written, including my use of the term "politics," suggest any different?
Eventually this tendency gets diminished with a few years of service.
I suspect you'll find a similar situation with independent unions, like this one in Massachusetts.
Here, I've mostly seen private prisons (and related private programs like in-house drug rehab programs) do a really good job of making the pitch to get the contract, and cleaning up their act around renewal time. But in between, there's not always adequate supervision of the conditions.
This Google Search provides a great many studies which compare the costs and quality of private versus public prisons. The results appear inconclusive, at best.
I'm not saying that there's no potential role for private prisons. In theory, prison privatization could allow for government to perform a more effective oversight role in prison conditions, for example. In public prisons, review of corrections officers' conduct is generally made by other employees of the corrections department (until the prisoner files suit, at least, which remedies only the harshest abuse). Properly done, the state could retain only an up-close licensing/disciplinary role in the process, providing a much more independent check on abuse by prison officials. I just haven't seen that happen very much.
[Sorry, Sasha, I know this is off-topic]
It's the same in Orange County, and I believe several other counties in California.
Frankly, departments of correction are already noticing that "tougher sentencing"--things like California's mandatory "3 strikes" law--are creating long term policy problems--particularly when dealing with a limited number of prison beds and skyrocketing healthcare costs.
Most corrections professionals I deal with recognize that the beds will always be full, so there is no reason to agitate for tougher laws.