Government
Aug. 1, 2002
State Has Worst Prison Crowding
WASHINGTON - Despite a 2 percent drop in the number of inmates held in its state and federal prisons, California has the worst prison overcrowding in the nation by a wide margin, according to government statistics out Tuesday.
Federal and state prisons in California are designed to hold only 80,000 inmates - but housed almost double that in 2001, with 150,536 incarcerated, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"Design capacity assumes one person per cell. We very seldom do that. For the most part, we double them up," Russ Heimerisch, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections, said.
The state with the next most crowded prisons is Florida, where facilities meant for 56,000 held 76,000 last year. Texas, the state with the highest prison population, imprisoned 153,000 in facilities which can contain 156,000.
Other states with significant overcrowding included Alabama, with 12,000 over its rated capacity, and New York, with 10,000 more inmates than its prisons were designed to hold.
The federal report shows that California has suffered through a 20 percent increase in convicts since 1995, reaching a total of 159,444 in custody last year. That figure includes inmates held in local and private jails and in hospitals, as well as those in federal and state prisons.
Most of the overcrowding in the state is in state institutions. About 2,300 of the 159,444 inmates housed in California prisons at the close of 2001 were federal prisoners, Heimerisch said. California has few federal facilities.
Heimerisch explained that the state has an excess of room in its minimum-security facilities but is dealing with a shortage of space in maximum-security prisons, where violent felons often are forced into facilities that weren't designed to house them.
"We may have to rethink what we do with some of the lower-security prisons, because we just don't have the people to house those [high-security inmates]," Heimerisch said.
Overall, California has 8.1 percent of the total U.S. prison population.
But the state housed 7,179 inmates in private or local jails last year while leading the United States in the number, 628, placed in other state-operated or federally operated facilities, such as hospitals.
Still, the total housed in outsourced facilities is small compared to Texas, which dwarfed all other states by placing more than 16,000 outside its system in 2001. Unlike California facilities, Texas prisons could jail 3,000 more inmates before reaching their rated capacity of 156,000.
Other statistics in the report show that, despite having one of the largest female prison populations, California experienced a dramatic decline of 11.1 percent in the number of women incarcerated between 2000 and 2001, with 9,921 behind bars last year.
Nationally, African-Americans made up the greatest percentage of convicted people living in America's prisons, at 46 percent, compared to whites, 36 percent, and Hispanics, 16 percent. The largest numbers of men and women incarcerated were between the ages of 25 and 34.
Finally, the statistics indicate that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had 21,226 people locked up at its peak on Sept. 25, 2001, following the terrorist attacks and a nationwide dragnet. But the INS ended the year with 19,137 prisoners - 391 fewer than were held at the start of 2001.
For the Record In a story published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal on July 31, 2002 about the population of California prisions, the name of the California Department of Corrections spokesperson was mispelled. His name is Russ Heimerich.
The Daily Journal regrets the error.
James Gordon Meek
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