To Save Lives, California Must Divest From Criminalization & Incarceration
Criminal Justice and Immigrant Rights Organizations Release Proposal Highlighting Urgency for Bold Public Health Response Amid COVID-19 Pandemic.
05.11.2020 - Today, an alliance of key criminal justice, immigrant rights, and public health organizations released The Budget to Save Lives, a detailed proposal highlighting the urgent public health need for the California 2020-21 budget to prioritize decarceration efforts. The package comes as Governor Newsom prepares to release the May revision to the state budget amid a record shortfall caused by the COVID-19 crisis.
The criminalization and incarceration of California residents is one of the most costly areas of the state budget. Despite the state’s trajectory towards decarceration and its recent move to prohibit private detention prisons, the overall corrections budget has grown steadily every year—from $8.9 billion in 2012-13 to a proposed $13.4 billion in 2020-21—and the state has continued to allow the expansion of immigrant prisons in at least three proposed sites.
Before the COVID-19 crisis, local jails, state prisons, and immigration detention centers in California were dangerously overcrowded and had shocking records of medical negligence. For months, doctors and health experts have warned that the inherent conditions of incarceration, where physical distancing is impossible, put incarcerated people and surrounding communities at risk. To respond, courts and counties have taken critical decarceration measures, but the state of California has lagged behind.
The Budget to Save Lives argues that it is a public health imperative to divest from criminalization and incarceration and redirect funds to life-saving community-based services and alternatives to incarceration. Investment in community-based services and alternatives to incarceration must include funding that supports:
Transitional and permanent supportive housing,
Behavioral health and biomedical health community-based treatment, and
Sponsorship and community-based integration services for immigrants and asylum seekers.
"It is clearer now than ever that the health of each of us is dependent on the health of all of us," says Amber Akemi Piatt, Health Instead of Punishment Program Director at Human Impact Partners, a national public health organization. "Growing public health research has repeatedly affirmed what frontline communities have said all along: that incarceration harms one’s mental and physical health, that incarceration negatively impacts one’s family and community health, and that the criminal legal system disproportionately harms people who are structurally marginalized. We urgently need a California budget that promotes health, dignity, and justice."
“The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis, but it is also an opportunity to reevaluate, reprioritize, and redirect California’s budget away from failed punitive models and towards holistic, public health driven strategies for public safety,” explains Ivette Alé, Senior Policy Lead at Dignity and Power Now. The State’s long standing crises of mass incarceration, houselessness and economic inequality are magnified by the pandemic and require that the Governor and State Legislature boldly invest in community-based services that protect the health and safety of our most vulnerable communities.
"Californians are currently subsidizing a system that profits from the caging of human beings," says Layla Razavi, Deputy Executive Director at Freedom for Immigrants. "In order to build a safer, healthier society for all, we must begin to envision a world without immigrant jails and prisons. This starts with divesting from the inhumane, profit-driven immigration detention system and investing in community-based alternatives. Enacting a budget that reflects our values by reinvesting in community, and not cages, is a vital first step that will both save lives and protect public health.”
“During this global health crisis, it is more important than ever that taxpayer dollars be put towards protecting the health and wellness of every Californian,” says Sandy Valenciano, Andy Grove Immigrants’ Rights Fellow at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and member of Dignity Not Detention Coalition. “The incarceration of our community members through prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities is not only costly and cruel, but it is also counteractive to our state and country’s broader public health goals. We call on the Governor and our elected officials to see this revision of the state budget as the critical opportunity it is; this is a chance to protect public health in the short- and long-term by investing in community-based services and alternatives to incarceration.”
“A budget is a statement about our values,” says Brian Kaneda, Los Angeles Coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB). “In the era of COVID-19, California can not afford to have some of the highest rates of both poverty and prison spending. We’re on target to spend at least $16.5 billion tax-payer dollars statewide on corrections this year, rising annually. That shouldn’t sound reasonable to anyone, especially during a global pandemic. We need bold leadership to shift spending away from incarceration and toward community-based systems of care. We need robust funding to make that vision of care a reality. We need the community to have a seat at the table during the creation and implementation process of what should be a transformational budget for California. We need a statewide Decarceration Budget which affirms that no life is disposable.”
"Being someone who has experienced time being in juvenile hall I know first hand that youths aren’t safe and that they are better off at home, says Jared O'Brien of the Youth Justice Coalition. "The youths are supposed to be the ones who we say are the future of tomorrow but yet we have them locked up under a global pandemic knowing that diseases spread faster among the incarcerated population. We are demanding that all youths get released who are on a 7o7 A charge, a technical probation violation, a misdemeanor or a low level felony, and all other youths on 7o7B charges should have the opportunity to go see a judge and get assessed and still be released."
***