Posts Tagged: prisons
Opinion
By increasing incarceration, Prop 36 would expand a system of what many rightly call modern-day slavery. More bodies in cells means more nearly-free labor for corporations. This is where Prop 6 becomes crucial.
Opinion
AB 280 sets clear limits on the use of solitary confinement and provides alternatives to isolation that ensure safety and dignity for incarcerated individuals. The bill sets clear limits on the use of solitary confinement and ends the practices entirely for pregnant people, as well as those in certain age groups and with certain disabilities.
News
California prison spending for 2023-24 in the proposed $297 billion state budget is up to $14.5 billion – even as the prisoner population drops.
News
Under a 2022-23 state budget, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is launching a process to close prisons and deactivate facilities within others. One on the chopping block is Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe, a city of 18,000, in eastern Riverside County, that is closing in March 2025.
News
A spate of smash-and-grab robberies and a rising crime rate may have dampened their hopes early on, but criminal justice reformers say the recently ended legislative session brought a raft of significant improvements to the way California treats people caught up in the system.
Opinion
OPINION: Prolonged solitary confinement is torture. Whether it is referred to as administrative segregation, secure housing, or protective custody, the effect on an individual is the same. Significant psychological harm, and mental and physical damage that can be permanent.
News
In January 2020, Californians thought they were getting out of the private prison business. They are, but under a new law, AB 32, which went into effect at the first of the year, the state remains heavily invested in backing for-profit correctional services — including facilities that resemble detention centers run by the same companies who operate private prisons.
News
For Cristina Garcia, there’s something unsettling about the idea that an unvaccinated person, confined to a prison cell, could be exposed to the corona virus because a guard or other state employee had declined an opportunity to be vaccinated.
News
The modern history of mental-health care in California begins more than half a century ago with passage of the landmark 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, an ambitious — but ultimately disastrous — overhaul of a draconian “system” of hoary old mental hospitals throughout California. Most of the hospitals were closed, but the “community care” that was to take their place never materialized.
News
The head of the California Democratic Party says the CDP will no longer accept political contributions from private prison corporations. Party Chair Eric Bauman said any contributions received since May 21, 2017 would be “donated to organizations doing critical work to protect immigrants from the Trump administration or to support and rehabilitate recently incarcerated folks.”