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EDITORIAL: California's prisons do a lousy job of rehabilitating

Orange County Register - 2/5/2019

Feb. 05--While the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has steadily expanded rehabilitative funding over the past few years, the department has unfortunately not done enough to make sure its programs are actually working, reports the state auditor.

A summary of the report, released last week, plainly states the broader set of problems: "Several poor administrative practices have hindered reductions in recidivism and denied inmates access to in-prison rehabilitation programs."

Such a state of affairs should be unacceptable to all Californians regardless of where they stand on recent criminal justice reforms.

If people who are eventually going to be released back into society are going to be imprisoned, the least the prison system can do is leave them well-equipped to be in better shape to live a lawful life than when they entered.

Failure to do that creates problems not only for the incarcerated, but for everyone involved, including potential future victims.

Alas, CDCR's implementation of rehabilitative programming efforts has fallen short in many ways, for numerous reasons.

One failure is simply that CDCR is "failing to place inmates into appropriate rehabilitation programs, leading to inmates being released from prison without having any of their rehabilitation needs met."

According to the auditor, CDCR failed to meet any of the rehabilitative needs for 62 percent of inmates who were assessed as at risk of going back to crimes against society and were released in the 2017-18 fiscal year.

This is sometimes due to CDCR simply not assigning inmates to the classes they were on wait lists for. And some were placed on wait lists for classes they won't be able to access before completing their sentences.

The auditor also notes that "in practice, Corrections is not prioritizing inmates with a high risk to recidivate and a high need for the rehabilitation programs."

Obviously, that's a problem.

The auditor notes CDCR "has neither established performance measures for its rehabilitation programs nor measured their cost effectiveness."

In reviewing CDCR's cognitive behavioral therapy, the auditor notes that many of the vendors providing CBT classes in California prisons are using curricula that aren't evidence-based.

With recidivism rates perpetually high -- averaging over 50 percent over the past decade -- none of this bodes well for California's criminal justice system.

Clearly, the issues cited by the auditor need to be corrected. But this also speaks to just how much work needs to be done to get California's criminal justice system where it ought to be.

For decades, our state's justice system focused primarily on warehousing people in dysfunctional prisons and jails with little regard to the public safety benefits of such a system.

Ensuring that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation lives up to its name should be a high priority of the Gavin Newsom administration and the state Legislature moving forward.

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(c)2019 The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.)

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