Californians are beginning to appreciate that our prison system is deeply flawed and unsustainable. But the prisons are only the center of a whole way of imagining public safety that has dominated California for nearly 40 years and which has left us badly positioned to confront the risks we face in this new century. We need a new way of thinking about public safety.
Our current model places violent crime at the center of our public universe. The swollen prisons now contain some 6X their population in 1980, nearly 170,000 adults. Built to contain armies of Charles Manson’s, and Richard Allen Davis’s prowling around California’s homes and hills, their aging “legacy” prisoners present medical needs that threaten to strain the state’s finances for decades. Fortunately we do not have armies of such socio-paths in our hills (although we have stealthy individuals like Philip Garrido hiding in plain sight, but more on that later). Instead of the Manson family (which really did seem pretty scary to me when I moved to the state as a student in 1977), what menaces Californians today are the “four horsemen” of the environmental apocalypse, fire, drought, earthquake, and climate change.
When those operate in combination, --- an earthquake for example, leading to widespread fires in a large urban area, --- millions of Californian’s are endangered. Crime indeed can be part of that threat, but it does not define it. Consider the fate of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina blasted it in 2005. The resulting urban environmental disaster posed serious life risks to thousands of residents, mostly in the form of flood, fire, lack of food and water. What dominated the early coverage of the disaster, however, were sordid and ultimately almost completely false rumors of violent crime. What was undeniably true is that a state which spent billions to incarcerate more of its citizens than almost any other state in the union (Louisiana), had proved utterly incapable of protecting its citizens against a disaster folks had seen coming for decades. Are we next?
What would replace the gold plated fortresses that now gird our state as the center of a new public safety model centered on these environmental risks and their social consequences? Here are a few ideas just to begin the discussion.