The following opinion piece, “CA Should Send Prisoners Home Instead of Spending Millions on New Facilities” is written by Steve Brooks and appears at Truthout.
Excerpts from the piece appear below.
For two years, I walked the lower yard track at San Quentin State Prison, watching construction crews tear down an old furniture factory to build a $239 million Scandinavian-styled learning center. They have now removed the fence blocking the incarcerated population’s view of the new facility. Last week marked the opening of the building, only for incarcerated people who have designated programming inside.
Gov. Gavin Newsom was back at San Quentin a few weeks ago for handshakes, photographs, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony to memorialize these next step towards “normalization” — one of the four pillars of his so-called “California Model” of reform that re-named the prison I live in as the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. This is what normalization means to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR): Instead of sending people back to their communities, the state is spending millions on new buildings, and accessibility for incarcerated people is unclear at best.
This new building complex serves mainly as an expensive rebranding effort to make California prisons appear less inhumane after decades of cruel and dehumanizing treatment. Despite continued projected declines in the incarcerated population, CDCR’s proposed 2026-27 budget has grown to nearly $14.2 billion, much of it going to officer pay, which continues to climb at triple the rate of inflation, driving annual costs per incarcerated person to about $130,000 annually.
This new building complex serves mainly as an expensive rebranding effort to make California prisons appear less inhumane after decades of cruel and dehumanizing treatment. Despite continued projected declines in the incarcerated population, CDCR’s proposed 2026-27 budget has grown to nearly $14.2 billion, much of it going to officer pay, which continues to climb at triple the rate of inflation, driving annual costs per incarcerated person to about $130,000 annually.
The truth is that helping people heal and transform their lives so that they might return to society will reduce the size, power, and scope of CDCR. This should be considered a metric of success. Massive corrections budgets are not based on successes, but past failures. In fact, CDCR is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain thousands of empty beds and multiple empty prisons rather than diverting those funds toward rehabilitation and getting people home to their families.
“We know that many folks have been serving long, draconian sentences and have been incarcerated since the ‘90s when we saw the large crime bills come down from the federal government,” Amber-Rose Howard, a formerly incarcerated woman and executive director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, said. “As we continue to decarcerate, we should be closing prisons.”
San Quentin’s transformation should not be measured by the size of its new learning center or the new name at its gate. If CDCR is serious about rehabilitation, we need to prioritize bringing people home over manufacturing and normalizing prison communities. When Governor Newsom made his announcement about transforming San Quentin in March 2023, he said, “We have to be in the homecoming business.” Spending more money on prison infrastructure does not bring us closer to that goal. Instead of building new prison facilities, California should invest in releasing people and supporting local communities. That’s real public safety.
You can read the full piece, “CA Should Send Prisoners Home Instead of Spending Millions on New Facilities,” on the Truthout website. Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues.
Steve Brooks is an award-winning journalist with bylines in TIME, Sports Illustrated, Bay City News Local News Matters, and more. He is the former editor- in-chief of San Quentin News and a co-founder of The People In Blue, a group of incarcerated people.
