Despite prisons so overcrowded that the state faces a Supreme Court order to reduce its prison population, lawyers for California’s attorney general want to keep nonviolent offenders behind bars.
Their reasoning? They need more cheap labor.
The Los Angeles Times reported last week that lawyers for Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris “had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.”
But Harris now claims she’s “shocked” by the LA Times report, telling BuzzFeed news, “I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.”
“I will be very candid with you,” Harris said, “because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court.”
The lawyers were contending with a federal order to make all nonviolent, two-felony offenders eligible for parole once half their sentence had been completed.
They argued that the nonviolent offenders were needed to combat California’s ever-present wildfire problem.
The judges didn’t buy the lawyers’ argument, ruling that “The record contains no evidence that defendants cannot implement the required parole process by that date, 11 months after they agreed to do so ‘promptly.’”
BuzzFeed featured a report last month on the 4,400 prisoners who firefight in California, making up half of all the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s team. They earn 8 to 37 cents an hour.
The department is only supposed to employ low-level, nonviolent offenders: exactly the inmates that California now needs to begin releasing.
BuzzFeed’s report notes the strange position the labor program places the inmates in, when they are considered safe enough to tackle a crucial and dangerous job, but not safe enough to be on parole: “Trusting an inexperienced criminal with a chainsaw hints at the peculiar, simultaneous empowerment and dehumanization that prisoner firefighters experience.”
