Alexander urges caution in praising the Governor's announcement:
Caution is in order – not because of what Schwarzenegger said, but rather what he didn't say. For example, he didn't say that prison sentences should be drastically reduced or that "three-strikes" laws for minor crimes should be abandoned. In fact, he said close to nothing about how spending on prisons would be funneled to schools, except to suggest that the prison system could be operated more cheaply if it were privatized.
...That announcement most certainly cheered the Corrections Corp. of America – the nation's largest private prison company. Wall Street investors would be the primary beneficiaries of any large-scale privatization effort, and there is good reason to believe that problems plaguing California's prisons will get much worse, not better, if private companies slash the amount of money spent on health care, shelter and food, without policy changes dramatically reducing the number of people behind prison walls.
And while privatization is a problem, it's not the only one, or the biggest one. The biggest one is racial disparity.
The skyrocketing incarceration rates of the past three decades have not affected all segments of California's population equally. African Americans and Latinos have been hardest hit, thanks largely to the war on drugs – a war that has targeted people of color for drug crimes, even though studies show they are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.
The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable. They have been rounded up by the thousands, locked in cages, and upon release ushered into a parallel social universe in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits – reminiscent of an era we supposedly left behind. Most of the people labeled felons are not murderers or dangerous criminals. They are black and brown, very poor and paying the price of a get-tough movement driven not by crime rates, but by politics – a politics that has scapegoated the most vulnerable as a means of scoring political points.
She concludes:
The subtext of Schwarzenegger's speech was that we need not worry about who's in prison or why, so long as it doesn't cost too much or interfere with the ability of middle-class university kids to get a good education. But private prisons that warehouse impoverished black and brown folks, while the relatively privileged trot off to college, are not a step in the right direction.
