KTLA News: "Pre-hearing press conference on building new prison facilities in California" (1978)

Yeah, you want to testify before this hearing today um in favor of uh prison alternatives as a direction and a goal more than incarceration. And each one of these will be speaking to a number an area within that context. As you know, there is a proposed development of 2400 new prison beds in the state of California at a time when we already have uh more than 1,800 permanent beds which are not in use. We're strongly opposed to this involves billions of dollars in taxpayers money. And at this particular time, I would like to present to you Richard Vega, who is a staff coordinator and will speak on this. I'll be brief in my remarks. What I would like you to focus your attention on is this chart. The Department of Corrections for the past 12 years has been trying to expand their prison system. Now, one of the arguments that they've been coming out with is that they're going to replace San Quinton and Folsam. Well, the department is not going to replace San Quinton and Folsam. The department is going to renovate. There's money in the budget to renovate Sanquint and Folsam, albeit they may be a little bit smaller, but on top of that, they're going to build 2400 new beds. They're going to build four 400 bed facilities for men in Southern California, one 400 bed psychiatric facility in Camaro, and one 400 bed facility for women in Northern California. Now, the department back in 1968, just to show you how how accurate they are at projecting prison populations, in 1968, the department said that by 1980, they would have 42,000 inmates in the system. At that time, they had 27,000. In fact, what has been happening is that the trend has been downward and we're now down to less than 22,000. Now, at the beginning of this year, in the governor's budget, the Department of Corrections stated that they had there were 1875 beds below capacity. On March 29th of this year, the Herald LA Herald Examiner asked Director Anamoto what the population was, and it had dropped to 19,000. Ladies and gentlemen, the trend is downward. The Department of Correction has more than enough ample facilities to put away vicious, hardened criminals. It does not need additional facilities. So what this is telling you is that the projections are always off. This is they're saying that the trend is upward, but in fact we see that it's going down. And that's why I wanted you to see this. Now I just want to briefly state that the department is now claiming that they're saying, well, forget the fact that we were wrong before. They're saying, okay, we goofed up, but now things are different. Now we have a determinant sentencing law and therefore we don't have the kind of variables that we did before. Therefore we are not able to predict with accuracy just how many prison how many populationations we're going to have in our prisons. And we're saying that that's also not true. And the reason that's not true is that the one factor that has to be used in order to determine what a prison population is going to be in your facilities is that of the commitment rate. How many people are the judges sending the prison? and the commitment rate has not gone up significantly except for a spurt in April of this year. And we've been operating under the the determinate sentencing law since July of last year. And so what we're saying is that there's hardly enough evidence at this time on which to base a projection saying that we're going to need more prison facilities. We need to wait. We need to see what the uh commitment rate is. We need also to see whether in fact sentences are going to be longer. The evidence seems to be that sentences, actual sentences are going to be somewhat slightly longer than they were under the old indeterminate sentencing law. But in fact, when you take away the good time, which is about a third of the total sentence, your sentences actually come out lower than they were before. And that's a factor in determining your prison population, too, in determining your turnover rate. Very briefly about alternatives to incarceration, since I know many of you are are interested in that. They're in your packets, but I know you would like to hear a real live human >> alternatives. There are many programs throughout the states that have high percentages of success from 70 all the way up to 100 job employment, skill training, so on and so forth. The abuses that are occurring in prison are gross. people are being so um we'd like to see this study completed so we can implement alternatives in California so the crime rate will go down malpractice by doctors in the penal facilities and his name is Kenny Wade my name is Kenny Wade and I'm up here as a concerned citizen institution that I was in was Tracy California dual vocational institution they had in one year 87 stabbins and 12 mur murders in a one-year period. And I'd like to speak about the medical malpractice things that happened at that time later on in the committee. Thank you. >> Glad to take any questions that you press have. >> What's your main going to be today in the hearing? >> Well, we're going to My only problem you're in favor of large prisons, state prisons, as long as they're located out change in uses and concepts relative to the state hospital system. And I think that's an easy response. facilities that each community now houses. >> Senator, we want to warn you, as I'm going to warn every witness, that we do not accept you to read your total statements, but we would like to have just a summary of it on the community at large. And that is that I'm concerned about ramifications of placing a state prison adjacent to a hospital. In the event of prison disturbances or escape attempts, who could guarantee the physical safety of hospital grounds? would seem to me to be a most disturbing influence on the mental health of the hospital residents. Again, to repeat something Mr. Remember I said in addition to that very human concern