Corruption

Pay-To Stay Jail in Riverside

By Evil Hamster on | From evilhamsteroftheday.blogspot.com

Image via WikipediaThe article below was written by Christopher Petrella at http://www.nationofchange.org/.

Very good article, but Christopher: Please don't call Correctional Officers circumambulating. You have no idea what kind of bullshit Correctional Officers have to put up with. Anyway, other then the stereotyping, the article is very good. I must add a few details and hope you will see them.

The Riverside County Sheriff Department jails have been overcrowded since I began working there in 1991. No one cares. The Riverside County Sheriff Department's so called Inmate Welfare Fund makes more money (profit) than you can imagine on the backs of inmates, by charging them extreme amounts for phone calls and commissary. Look that up and find a corruption gold mine in Riverside, and most likely everywhere. Now don't get me wrong, I am not an inmate advocate and I don't think jail should be a nice place to be. However, a government making money off of the backs of inmates, most of whom are already poor, is not the right thing to do. In addition, I am learning real quickly that Riverside County bleeds money from their own employees, with the unions help..........it's crazy out here in the Inland Empire. Keep up the good work.

PS: Riverside County needs money to shut down the Medical Marijuana Clinics, because the voters approved it but the voters don't matter. Think about it. No wonder everyone wants to "occupy" something. It's because the world is full of shit....pardon my language.

At 3400 Market Street in Riverside, California rests the Riverside Marriott, a picturesque business-friendly hotel boasting an impressive list of amenities including a spa, state of the art exercise facilities, heated outdoor pools, and a mezzanine level four-star restaurant and lounge.

The property offers 292 air-conditioned guestrooms each appointed with a refrigerator, coffee maker, an automated climate control system, high speed Wi-Fi, and a beverage service. Rooms at the Riverside Marriott can be reserved for a rate of $109.00/day. Less than one mile southeast at 4000 Orange Street stands the Robert Presley Detention Center, one of five jails in Riverside County operated by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Each cell comes fully equipped with running water, a mattress, and a circumambulating correctional officer.

Beginning early next year rooms here and in other county facilities can be reserved for a rate of $142.42/day. On October 8th the Riverside County Board of Supervisors approved a measure that authorizes the municipality to begin charging prisoners $142.42 per day of their prison stay in an effort to save the county up to $5 million dollars per annum.

The Board’s decision comes amidst a budgetary crisis of unprecedented proportions as the state of California attempts to “privatize” its way out of last year’s $9.6 billion deficit. Although California has had ubiquitous budget difficulties since the passage of Proposition 13-- a 1978 ballot initiative establishing that property is to be assessed at its acquisition value and that taxes levied thereon will not exceed 1% --, the most recent crisis of capitalism emerging in 2007 has only exacerbated an already barbed problem. The global economic meltdown has engendered a series of high cost, unprecedented policy measures aimed at stemming economic losses and promoting recovery.

Governments around the world have appropriated trillions of dollars in loans, asset purchases, guarantees, and direct spending on private sector bailouts related to the crisis. Unsurprisingly, taxpayers have shouldered the burden of these stimulus measures.

At 3400 Market Street in Riverside, California rests the Riverside Marriott, a picturesque business-friendly hotel boasting an impressive list of amenities including a spa, state of the art exercise facilities, heated outdoor pools, and a mezzanine level four-star restaurant and lounge. The property offers 292 air-conditioned guestrooms each appointed with a refrigerator, coffee maker, an automated climate control system, high speed Wi-Fi, and a beverage service. Rooms at the Riverside Marriott can be reserved for a rate of $109.00/day.

Less than one mile southeast at 4000 Orange Street stands the Robert Presley Detention Center, one of five jails in Riverside County operated by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Each cell comes fully equipped with running water, a mattress, and a circumambulating correctional officer. Beginning early next year rooms here and in other county facilities can be reserved for a rate of $142.42/

On October 8th the Riverside County Board of Supervisors approved a measure that authorizes the municipality to begin charging prisoners $142.42 per day of their prison stay in an effort to save the county up to $5 million dollars per annum.

The Board’s decision comes amidst a budgetary crisis of unprecedented proportions as the state of California attempts to “privatize” its way out of last year’s $9.6 billion deficit. Although California has had ubiquitous budget difficulties since the passage of Proposition 13-- a 1978 ballot initiative establishing that property is to be assessed at its acquisition value and that taxes levied thereon will not exceed 1% --, the most recent crisis of capitalism emerging in 2007 has only exacerbated an already barbed problem. The global economic meltdown has engendered a series of high cost, unprecedented policy measures aimed at stemming economic losses and promoting recovery. Governments around the world have appropriated trillions of dollars in loans, asset purchases, guarantees, and direct spending on private sector bailouts related to the crisis. Unsurprisingly, taxpayers have shouldered the burden of these stimulus measures.

In The New Imperialism (2003) David Harvey suggests that during moments of crisis “accumulation by dispossession” is one strategy of the state implemented to stabilize the economy. (“Accumulation by dispossession” is little more than the most contemporary iteration of Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation.”) Harvey’s theory of “accumulation by dispossession” is instrumental in examining the ways in which the capitalist state helps to smooth out the crisis-prone tendencies of the capitalist system. Today, “accumulation by dispossession” works by dispossessing citizens of their assets through two primary strategies: 1) personal indebtedness (think structural readjustment policies on a quotidian register) and 2) externalizing risk (or shifting risk) from the state to the citizen. The latter option essentially amounts to a form of double taxation. The latest instantiation of “externalizing risk” can be seen in Riverside Country, California where the Board of Administrators plans to enact a fee-for-service plan for “criminals,” or as the state now conceives of them, “consumers.”

What’s particularly noxious about Riverside County’s pay-to-stay program is that an ostensibly progressive Supreme Court Decision issued last May unwittingly architected the conditions for its existence.

In a landmark decision in Brown V. Plata (5/2011) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding in California's prisons is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court's ruling means that the state of California must reduce its prison population by approximately 32,000 prisoners within the next two years. But rather than free 32,000 low-level offenders, Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed a law to transfer them to other “local facilities.” Governor Brown’s “realignment plan” is designed to ease prison overcrowding by sentencing thousands of nonviolent felons to county jails instead of state prisons, thereby shifting the economic burden from the state to municipalities.

Brown defends “realignment” as a measure aimed both 1) reducing the state's corrections expenditures to free up additional outlays for public education and 2) accommodating a federal court order. Brown’s justification comes at a time when the Regents at the University of California have proposed an 81% tuition hike over the next four years. Meanwhile, California's adult prison population has grown from about 97,000 in 1990 to nearly 161,000 today, while the cost of incarceration during has risen from $20,562 per inmate to $47,101. (There are, by the way, currently over 2.3 million citizens incarcerated in the United States.) The corrections department now draws $9.8 billion from the state's general fund, or 11.4% of this year's spending plan. That is more than the state spends on the University of California and California State University systems combined. Over eighteen states, in fact, spend more on corrections than public education.

The Brown V. Plata decision—presumably premised on upholding the Constitution—has unfortunately provided the conditions necessary for what could be called “the Great Risk shift” for prisoners. And California isn’t the only state coping with cuts to its budget and prison system. Jefferson County, Alabama filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history last week after amassing massive debt and contending with a huge budget shortfall. And in Texas thousands of prisoners in have been eating two meals a day on weekends since April in a bid to save the prison system money. In Camden County, Georgia, officials have considered the idea of sending prisoners to work as firefighters to cope with budget woes. Prisoners, of course, are not protected under minimum wage law or Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) standards.

As the incarceration rate continues to swell, corrections officials have begun to experiment with different models of prison and jail management, seeking to maintain order and provide basic services while meeting ever tighter budgetary circumscriptions. Riverside County officials have begun to justify their nascent pay-to-stay program by contending that new revenue from inmates could save low to mid-wage county jobs that would otherwise be on the chopping block. This rhetorical strategy is ancient: pit prisoners against the class from which they come. In Punishing the Poor (2009) U.C. Berkeley sociologist Loic Wacquant reports that 60% of those currently incarcerated were at the time of arrest living at or below 50% of the poverty line. And according a recent report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau nearly 20.5 million Americans, or 7% of the U.S. population lives at or below 50% of the poverty line.

But forcing prisoners to pay for their containment has never really been about stimulating the economy, has it? At the same time the Obama administration has recommended a dramatic "spending freeze" on any and all projects unrelated to empire building, it has surreptitious increased the federal budget for prison expenditures. President Obama's combined budget requests for fiscal years 2011 and 2012 include a 10% increase in funding for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, bringing the total to more than $6.8 billion.

The strategy from the top has been consistent: Divide, conquer, shift risk, repeat. How else could we have ended up in a situation in which the net worth of the wealthiest 400 Americans now equals that of the poorest 150 million?