California Prison Research Articles

Necrotizing community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia: an emerging problem in correctional facilities.

Community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) skin infections have been common in prisons for more than a decade. However, CA-MRSA as a cause of pneumonia has been reported infrequently. This infection can present with flu-like symptoms and rapidly progress, possibly leading to death in a matter of days. Two cases of MRSA community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) associated with influenza-like illness in correctional officers employed in two separate prisons within the California prison system are presented. Both individuals were previously healthy, but one died of this disease. MRSA is an uncommon, but now recognized, cause of CAP. These cases are notable for their unique presentation and occurrence in non-health care, occupational settings. Prompt diagnosis and intervention by occupational health nurses and physicians are critical to improving outcomes, especially in high-risk settings such as prisons. These worksites need an effective occupational health program to manage MRSA, with adequate training for both employees and inmates.

The Just-Barely-Sustainable California Prisonerss Rights Ecosystem

Nationwide, litigation currently plays a far smaller role as a corrections oversight mechanism than in decades past, a change largely caused by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA). Yet no such decline is evident in the nation’s most populous state, California, where prisoners’ rights litigation remains enormously influential and was the trigger to the criminal justice “Realignment” that is the subject of this symposium. Indeed, every prison in California is subject to numerous ongoing court orders governing conditions of confinement. This article examines why California is different. It argues California’s very large bar includes a critical mass of highly expert prisoners’ rights lawyers. Working for both non-profits and for-profit firms, they benefited from a pipeline of large-scale, pre-PLRA, fees-paying cases that sustained them while they learned to cope with the statutory obstacles. And the Ninth Circuit’s hospitable bench awarded them some favorable fee-related rulings in support of their coping strategies. In short, they learned how to — just barely — maintain a prisoners’ rights docket nothwithstanding very substantial financial hurdles. They continue to litigate old and new cases, but ongoing challenges pose a real threat to the fragile litigation ecosystem they have created.

Prevalence and factors associated with smoking tobacco among men recently released from prison in California: A cross-sectional study

BackgroundOver 1.5 million people are incarcerated in state and federal correctional facilities in the United States. Formerly incarcerated men have significantly higher rates of mortality and morbidity than the general population, disparities that have been partially attributed to higher rates of tobacco smoking-related illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease and cancer. MethodsWe compared the prevalence of smoking tobacco in a sample of 172 men who were released from California state prisons to Oakland and San Francisco between 2009 and 2011 to sub-populations of respondents to the 2009 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). Using logistic regression, we analyzed the association between lifetime history of incarceration and self-reported smoking status. ResultsSeventy-four percent of men recently released from prison reported being current tobacco smokers. The prevalence of smoking in a demographically similar group of men in the CHIS was 24%. We found in bivariate analysis that each additional five years of history of incarceration was associated with 1.32 times greater odds of smoking (95% CI 1.02 to 1.71). Illicit substance use was associated with a 2.47 higher adjusted odds of smoking (95% CI 1.29 to 5.39). In the multivariate model adjusting for age, income, substance use and mental health, every five years of incarceration was associated with 1.23 greater odds of smoking (95% CI 0.94 to 1.63) which was not statistically significant. ConclusionsGiven the high prevalence of smoking tobacco among former prisoners and the underlying high tobacco-related mortality rates, these findings suggest that a history of incarceration may be an important determinant of smoking. Prison and parole systems may be important potential settings for smoking-cessation interventions.

The Transformative Power of Sankofa: Teaching African History Inside San Quentin State Prison

This chapter describes the author's experience teaching ethnic studies inside a unique California prison, and calls for college‐in‐prison educators to engage culturally appropriate curricula to realize the full transformative potential of the prison classroom.

Nursing case management, peer coaching, and hepatitis a and B vaccine completion among homeless men recently released on parole: randomized clinical trial.

Although hepatitis A virus (HAV) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) infections are vaccine-preventable diseases, few homeless parolees coming out of prisons and jails have received the hepatitis A and B vaccination series. The study focused on completion of the HAV and HBV vaccine series among homeless men on parole. The efficacy of three levels of peer coaching (PC) and nurse-delivered interventions was compared at 12-month follow-up: (a) intensive peer coaching and nurse case management (PC-NCM); (b) intensive PC intervention condition, with minimal nurse involvement; and (c) usual care (UC) intervention condition, which included minimal PC and nurse involvement. Furthermore, we assessed predictors of vaccine completion among this targeted sample. A randomized control trial was conducted with 600 recently paroled men to assess the impact of the three intervention conditions (PC-NCM vs. PC vs. UC) on reducing drug use and recidivism; of these, 345 seronegative, vaccine-eligible subjects were included in this analysis of completion of the Twinrix HAV/HBV vaccine. Logistic regression was added to assess predictors of completion of the HAV/HBV vaccine series and chi-square analysis to compare completion rates across the three levels of intervention. Vaccine completion rate for the intervention conditions were 75.4% (PC-NCM), 71.8% (PC), and 71.9% (UC; p = .78). Predictors of vaccine noncompletion included being Asian and Pacific Islander, experiencing high levels of hostility, positive social support, reporting a history of injection drug use, being released early from California prisons, and being admitted for psychiatric illness. Predictors of vaccine series completion included reporting having six or more friends, recent cocaine use, and staying in drug treatment for at least 90 days. Findings allow greater understanding of factors affecting vaccination completion in order to design more effective programs among the high-risk population of men recently released from prison and on parole.

Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America. By Jonathan Simon. New York: The New Press, 2014. pp. 224. $26.95 cloth.

Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America. By Jonathan Simon. New York: The New Press, 2014. pp. 224. $26.95 doth.Hidden from sight and forgotten from mind, American prisons in the last forty years have been horrific Petri dishes for medical neglect, interpersonal cruelty, and unspeakable conditions. California, which incarcerates the largest number of inmates (albeit not the largest per-capita), has been particularly notable for its abysmal incarceration practices, so much that, when commenting about his first impression of supermax institutions, Judge Thelton Henderson said to criminologist Keramet Reiter, what was surprising to me was the inhumanity of the thing. Jonathan Simon's new book offers the general public a sobering look into California prisons through the prism of federal court decisions, which encourages humanism and empathy and does not allow the reader to look away.The book tells the story of several federal court decisions that tackled, head-on, the crux between mass incarceration and prison conditions. It begins with Madrid v. Gomez (1995), which exposed the conditions at supermax institutions and critiqued their application to the mentally ill, and proceeds with Coleman v. Wilson (2009) and Plata v. Sclmarzenegger (2009), which addressed, respectively, serious mental and physical health care neglects, culminating in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata (2011), which affirmed the connection between the mass incarceration project and its outcome-extreme prison overcrowding-and the conditions behind bars. Simon's account of the decisions, and the horrific abuse and dehumanization that brought them about, highlights two main themes. The first is the nature of American incarceration (and California incarceration in particular) as a veritable human rights crime of massive proportions, pulling it out of the American tendency to view things through an internal, exceptionalist lens. The second is the inherent connection between mass incarceration and prison conditions, which are frequently discussed separately in academia and public policy. To Simon, both are manifestations of an overall correctional mentality of total incapacitation: a systemic fear of crime and blanket assumption of dangerousness, coupled with insecurity about the ability to correctly gauge risk, which leads to indiscriminating incarceration of high-risk and low-risk individuals for lengthy periods of time without consideration of the conditions of their incarceration, or of the logistics necessary for their humane confinement. The court decisions reviewed in the book, argues Simon, signal a departure from this ideology, which he defines as a dignity cascade: a willingness to relate to the inmates as human beings who are entitled to more than bare life, but to personal safety, health, and human company.Indeed, Simon's book itself can be seen as an important contributor to a dignity cascade. Written in an engaging, accessible style, and providing the personal stories of plaintiffs in prison condition cases, Simon humanizes the individuals involved and evokes empathy and care for their preventable, horrible plight, while still making the bigger point that the violations are a systematic problem rather than isolated occurrences. …

Toward a prison theology of California’s ecclesia incarcerate

The State of California has been a trendsetter in radical forms of penal policy and mass-incarceration in Western societies. As such California’s prison state and its governance structures demand careful scrutiny. These governance structures are both formal and informal, manifesting different power structures at play within the system. Any proper theological account of such phenomena needs to reckon not only with these extant structures but also with the incarcerate ecclesia, the prison church. The present article aims to highlight the reality of this community within the California prison settings (with relevance to other penal contexts), a community that is locally supernaturally constituted, inter-racial, spatially transcendent and transformational, displaying the power of the gospel among its participants. In this way, the incarcerated church subversively fulfils the aims of the other formal and informal governance structures, both sanctioned by the State and manifest in prison gangs.

MAKING PUNISHMENT PAY: The Political Economy of Revenue, Race and Regime in the California Prison Boom.

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960-2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.

Rates and risk factors for Coccidioidomycosis among prison inmates, California, USA, 2011.

In California, coccidioidomycosis is a disease acquired by inhaling spores of Coccidioides immitis, a fungus found in certain arid regions, including the San Joaquin Valley, California, USA, where 8 state prisons are located. During 2011, we reviewed coccidioidomycosis rates at 2 of the prisons that consistently report >80% of California's inmate cases and determined inmate risk factors for primary, severe (defined as pulmonary coccidioidomycosis requiring >10 hospital days), and disseminated coccidioidomycosis (defined by hospital discharge International Classification of Disease, Ninth Revision code). Inmates of African American ethnicity who were >40 years of age were at significantly higher risk for primary coccidioidomycosis than their white counterparts (odds ratio = 2.0, 95% CI 1.5-2.8). Diabetes was a risk factor for severe pulmonary coccidioidomycosis, and black race a risk factor for disseminated disease. These findings contributed to a court decision mandating exclusion of black inmates and inmates with diabetes from the 2 California prisons with the highest rates of coccidioidomycosis.

I Cannot Forget: Imprisoned in Korea, Accused at Home

<i>I Cannot Forget: Imprisoned in Korea, Accused at Home</i>

Community justice and public safety: Assessing criminal justice policy through the lens of the social contract

A reconceptualization of the idea of “community justice” is framed in the logic of the social contract and emphasizes the responsibility of the justice system for the provision of public safety. First, we illustrate the ways in which the criminal justice system has hindered the efforts of community residents to participate in the production of public safety by disrupting informal social networks. Then we turn to an examination of the compositional dynamics of California prison populations over time to demonstrate that the American justice system has failed to meet their obligations to provide public safety by incapacitating dangerous offenders. We argue that these policy failures represent a breach of the social contract and advocate for more effective collaboration between communities and the formal criminal justice system so that all parties can fulfill their obligations under the contract.

Challenges with controlling varicella in prison settings: experience of California, 2010 to 2011.

This article describes the epidemiology of varicella in one state prison in California during 2010 and 2011, control measures implemented, and associated costs. Eleven varicella cases were reported, of which nine were associated with two outbreaks. One outbreak consisted of three cases and the second consisted of six cases with two generations of spread. Among exposed inmates serologically tested, 98% (643/656) were varicella-zoster virus seropositive. The outbreaks resulted in > 1,000 inmates exposed, 444 staff exposures, and > $160,000 in costs. The authors documented the challenges and costs associated with controlling and managing varicella in a prison setting. A screening policy for evidence of varicella immunity for incoming inmates and staff and vaccination of susceptible persons has the potential to mitigate the impact of future outbreaks and reduce resources necessary to manage cases and outbreaks.

Race in California's prison fire camps for men: prison politics, space, and the racialization of everyday life.

The vast majority of social scientists agree that race is "socially constructed." Yet many scholars of punishment and prisons still treat race as static, self-evident categories. One result is that not enough is known about the production, meanings, and consequences of race as experienced by prisoners and those who guard and manage them. The author's research on California's prison fire camps uncovers the micro-level ways in which race is performed and imbued with meaning; he reveals how racial understandings color people and settings. One puzzle is that prisoners in California's fire camps will fight natural disasters side by side, sharing water and provisions, but separate into racial groups when in the camp itself. In part to answer this (and in part to develop better understandings of race and prisons more generally), the author unpacks the variegated nature of punishment and the spatialization of race and advocates for research that is faithful to the constructivist framework.

Book Review: Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons, by Shelley Bookspan

Book Review: Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons, by Shelley Bookspan

The Militarization and Madness of Everyday Life

This essay explores the militarization of everyday life in the United States today, following decades of unresolved cycles of wars fought at home (e.g., the war on drugs) and abroad. A “continuum of violence” is established, through which the tactics of war and war crimes gradually seep into domestic civilian life as the new norms. The gross abuses of presumed enemy combatants in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay come back to haunt us, as war crimes abroad impact behavior at home. The expansion and deformation of US prison culture—isolation, solitary confinement, and other dehumanizing practices—illustrate the militarization of US society. The mimetic recycling of war- and peacetime crimes is complete when the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantánamo Bay finds its parallel in the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Pelican Bay prison in California. The normalization of the abnormal and the militarization of everyday life appear in the proliferation of armed and dangerous gated communities, the presence of the invisible de rigueur house gun or house arsenal, invisible surveillance, and civilian passive acquiescence to stop-and-frisk encounters as well as in the mass incarceration (without mass protest) of “dangerous populations,” almost any young black man, Latino gang members, and small-fry neighborhood drug dealers. The normalization of long-term solitary confinement in Security Housing Units (SHUs) in US prisons crosses over into the realm of torture and crimes against humanity.

The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the Structural Constraints of a US Supermax Prison

On July 1, 2011, approximately four hundred prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison began a sustained hunger strike. Most of these prisoners had been in total solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation, for five or more years; a few had been in isolation for more than twenty years. The prisoners vowed to refuse food until five core demands were met. These demands were poignantly simple, including provision of warm clothes for their one hour per day of outdoor exercise in the “dog run,” permission to make one phone call per week, a supply of adequate food, and the possibility that indefinite assignment to total solitary confinement might be reviewed after some number of years. The first phase of the strike lasted three weeks, until correctional officials promised to reconsider the state’s segregation policies. Drawing on previously unavailable videos of negotiations between the strike leaders, published media interviews and correspondence with hunger strikers and correctional administrators, and contemporary news reports of the events, this article examines the history, tactics, and implications of the massive hunger strike that took place in California’s highest-security prison (a supermax) in the summer of 2011. The article argues that the strike embodies a legitimacy paradox. Although the history of prison organizing in California, and of hunger strikes around the world, suggests that prisoners willing to die to protest prison injustices also undermine the legitimacy of the system inflicting those injustices, the 2011 California prisoners on hunger strike repeatedly invoked the broader legitimacy of the US prison system. Indeed, the article argues that, although prisoners drew on an international dialogue about basic human rights and appropriate tactics of resistance to rights violations, the US supermax context limited the reform conversation to small, mundane debates about the language of rules and the slight adjustments in privileges provided to prisoners. But that very conversation ultimately highlighted the extremity of the conditions in supermax confinement, driving unprecedented and sustained media and legal attention to the use of supermaxes, across the United States and internationally, and inspiring another larger (thirty thousand prisoners participated at the peak) and longer (sixty days) hunger strike in 2013.

With Law at the Edge of Life

This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment, exclusion, and extermination. The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines our society in profound ways. Concentrating on the recent hunger strikes in the security housing units (SHUs) of Pelican Bay and throughout the California prison system, this essay reflects on the long reach and myriad forms of law in our penal archipelago. The new global order of justice not only focuses on those accused of criminal acts but also targets the racially suspect, the poor, the expendable. Why should we—those of us inside the privileged circle of life, free of police power, secure in our jobs, still in our homes—fear encountering the long arm of “The Patriot Act” or “The Military Commissions Act”? Why should we fear the political expediency of “preventive detention” for those considered threats to order and to the American way of life? What kind of life is this—life lived on the edge, in the shadow of legal outlawry?

Supervision Intensity and Parole Outcomes: A Competing Risks Approach to Criminal and Technical Parole Violations

Recent scholarship about parole supervision indicates that higher supervision intensity is associated with an increased risk of parole violations. However, parole violations can take many forms—some minor and some serious—and theory suggests that supervision intensity might have differential effects depending upon the type of violation. We use “competing risks” survival models to identify supervision effects on five types of parole violations among 79,082 individuals released from prison in California: absconding, technical violations, drug use, violent offenses, and sexual offenses. We find that supervision effects are strongest for absconding violations. Past sexual offending also triggers significant supervision effects for technical violations, drug use violations, and violent violations. We conclude that parole violation patterns are influenced by parolee behaviors, the amount of attention the state is paying to those behaviors, and official markers of criminal dangerousness that are attached to particular parolees.

Democracy, Prison, and Public Safety Realignment: Renewing Our Imagination

The American carceral condition has waged a 200-year-old struggle where the lives of the guilty, the innocent, and the victimized have taken center stage in a debate centered on rehabilitation, reformation, and revenge. The drama has undergone a number of revisions from great scholarly authors, multidisciplinary intellectuals, and literary muses. Despite a number of new renderings, the central themes of the American prison have remained constant, and just as there have been builders of prisons, there have been forces intent on their destruction. The current state of the American carceral condition has burgeoned since the neoliberal political and economic shift began in 1980. The State of California enjoys a political reputation as a socially liberal blue state, yet it is one of the national leaders in prison expansion, penal conservatism, and punitive excess. In 2011, California began the prison realignment system that includes sentencing restructuring and housing longterm felons in local county jails, thus shifting the financial burden and supervised release of inmates to local county Sheriff ’s offices. The realignment is but one layer of the state’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that California prisons violated the Eighth Amendment, in part, to overcrowding. The system is too young to reach definitive conclusions, but is at a crossroads. Either realignment will serve as another model for prison reformation and possibly prison abolition, or it will extend the carceral reach of the state into “free” space, essentially eliminating the wall, both literally and figuratively, that separates free souls from those held captive.

Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons. By Ethan Blue (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. ix plus 326 pp. $40.00)

Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons. By Ethan Blue (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. ix plus 326 pp. $40.00)