The closure, which Newsom proposed take place by October 2026, would happen despite the implementation of Proposition 36, a new California law that is predicted to briefly increase the number of people in the prison system.
“While Proposition 36 is expected to increase (the prison) population, the population should continue its downward trend over the long-term,” Newsom said in the proposal.
Newsom’s proposed budget pledges that a prison closure would save about $150 million annually. He called for the shutdown as part of his plan to close a $12 billion deficit.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office has calculated that California’s prison population — which, despite Prop 36’s additional inmates, is still estimated to start dropping again in 2027 — could allow Newsom to close as many asfive more prisons, saving $1 billion a year.
Instead, in last year’s budget cycle and in the new budget proposal, Newsom has taken a more cautious approach to trimming prison beds. Last year, he proposed closing 46 housing blocks inside 13 state prisons but declined to call for a total prison closure.
Advocates for prison closures welcomed Newsom’s announcement.
“I am relieved that Gov. Newsom has taken a step in the right direction by announcing an additional prison will close in 2026,” said Amber-Rose Howard, executive director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a coalition that advocates for reduced incarceration. “In the midst of an extremely difficult political moment, where Californians are suffering budget cuts to life-affirming programs, prison closures are a smart solution to offset some of those cuts.”
At the inmate population’s peak in 2006, California locked up 165,000 people in state prisons. Today, after a decade of sentencing changes, federal court intervention and a surge of releases tied to COVID-19, California’s prisons house about 91,000 people.
The Newsom administration expects to spend about $13.6 billion on the prison system next year.
Newsom has already moved to close four prisons over the course of his administration. He projects that those shutdowns will save the state $3.4 billion by 2027.
So far, Newsom closed the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy in 2021 and the California Correctional Center in Susanville in 2023. He ended a lease with a privately run prison called the California City Correctional Facility, and the corrections department removed the last prisoners from the Chuckwalla Valley State Prison near the Arizona border in October.
Some of those communitiesfought back, notably in Blythe, where the city hired a PR firm and attempted to lobby for the Chuckwalla facility’s survival. So far, the governor’s office has not shown any signs of reversing course.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terri Hardy said in a statement that the department will make its facility choice based on its own guidelines.
Those guidelines,spelled out in the California penal code, dictate that the criteria for closing prisons include the age and condition of the facility, its geographic proximity to other prisons, the economic impact to the local community and the programming available to incarcerated people at the facility.
The corrections department “is committed to managing its resources efficiently to best serve the people of California,” Hardy said. “The state would support the affected local community and workforce with an economic resiliency plan, and workers would be offered transfers to nearby facilities.”
This article was published by CalMatters. Read the original here.
