The State’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is in trouble; they didn’t meet the deadline to submit a proposal for release of inmates. A federal three judge panel ordered the release of forty thousand inmates in the next two years due to overcrowding, but the department objected and said, that’s not going to happen.
Apparently, the CDCR had a better, more reasonable solution to alleviate this issue. The plan is to build more facilities to transfer the inmates to, convert existing youth facilities into adult ones, and expand out-of-state transfers. This will not take two years; in a time period of six years, the department anticipates to reduce overcrowding rates from 190 percent to a possible 132 percent, which is more than what the panel ordered, according to a CDCR Press Release.
Releasing so many inmates will create chaos because of course people want their relatives to be released, and the rest of society does not want criminals out in the streets again. While it’s a good thing for the department and for safety in the prisons, the communities are strongly against it. The idea though is not to release violent criminals but instead release those that are at the end of their sentence, the elderly and sick, and the ones that are not a danger to society. An interactive map of California’s overcrowded prisons published in the Sacramento Bee shows us the exact numbers of our prison population. With several prisons at over 200 percent capacity, safety conditions for both inmates and correctional staff are not the best and it makes sense to try to improve these conditions and at the same time relieve the financial burden of the department.
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I completely agree with the sentiment that our prison system needs to be dealt with. When I was first introduced to the notion of early release, I was staunchly apposed to it. However, upon further investigation and analysis, I think that there is a large population of prisoners (particularly the elderly and non-violent offenders) who could greatly impact the overcrowding situation (if released) while minimizing the social impact of an early release program. Now, if there was only a way to educate the citizen population to understand that just because some media outlets report via fear mongering to manipulate political agendas, does not mean that everybody needs to believe what they say. It is unfortunate that the population of critical thinkers seems to be shrinking as more and more people chose to "just take their word for it" as opposed to actually doing some independent research to get the facts.
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