What drives incarceration rates, if not crime?
A. Laws and policies. It isn’t that California has more crime than other places. It’s that we have harsher sentences. We keep people longer. We have the highest parole failure rate in the country — meaning we send a huge number of parolees back to prison for violating the rules of parole, not for new crimes. Other states use community-based options for parolees who miss appointments or fail routine drug tests. California has chosen this unique path of ratcheting up incarceration — way beyond any other state — and it’s paying the price. Q. What would it take for California to reverse course? A. That’s a difficult question, given the politics of this issue, the strong influence of the prison guards’ union, and the private prison industry, and the continued dominance of fear-based politics. What’s been referred to as a correctional-industrial complex — consisting of prison workers, the people who sell products to prison systems, and the growing private-prison industry — that’s a very powe
