THE GROWTH OF IMPRISONMENT IN CALIFORNIA

Abstract

This article reports on a study of trends in imprisonment in the state of California over the period 1980-91. Documenting and analysing imprisonment in California is important to an international audience for two reasons. First, the pattern in California since 1980 is representative of a widespread trend in the United States of expansion in the scale of the prison enterprise. At least 90 per cent of American states are currently imprisoning offenders at a higher rate than at any other time in the twentieth century. The unprecedented expansion in California prison population is part of this pattern; and studying events in California is one approach to comprehending developments and conditions in most American states. The second reason why California's situation demands attention is that the growth in imprisonment in that state has been singular in both its pace and its magnitude. The number of prisoners in California increased more than fourfold in 11 years. The current 104,000 prisoners in California is by far the largest prison population in the Western world, more than twice the national prison populations of West Germany and Great Britain. Never has a prison system grown by so much in so short a time during a period of political and social stability. Figure 1 compares the 1990 prison population in California and three other large American states with national prison populations in major European countries. At the beginning of the 1980s, each of the European systems profiled was larger than all of the state systems. By 1990, three of the American state systems had grown to surpass each of the three European systems; and Florida was larger than Germany and Italy. The average major state system doubled in the decade while the average European system declined modestly. The second visually striking conclusion from Figure 1 is that California was in a category by itself in prison growth during the 1980s. The other three major American systems averaged growth levels about half that experienced in California. The fourfold increase in this major state to a prison population twice as large as any Western European country in 1990 seems a singular event in American correctional history. Our presentation of data from the California study proceeds in two parts. The first part (The California Story) uses statistics from California and sister states to document: the pace and extent of prison population growth in California; the extent to which the California pattern reflects the experience of other American states; the correlation between variation in potentially explanatory variables like crime and arrest rates and changes in imprisonment rates; and the way in which recent California experience has been used for projecting further growth in the prison system. The second part of the analysis (Policy Perspectives) will discuss three of our findings which are of importance to students of imprisonment policy in Western democracies. We seek to draw particular attention to the open-ended potential for prison population growth in periods of stable criminality; the enormous margin of error generated from