BAKERSFIELD CALIFORNIAN
Activists protest spending on prisons
About 20 people call for using money instead on education, prevention
By SARAH RUBY, Californian staff writer
e-mail: sruby@bakersfield.com

Posted: Wednesday June 1st, 2005, 11:05 PM
Last Updated: Wednesday June 1st, 2005, 11:34 PM

Roughly 20 people raised their poster boards in Delano Wednesday to challenge the state's investment in prisons instead of schools and hospitals. "Who would have dreamed 30 years ago we would see a prison every 15 minutes in the San Joaquin Valley," said activist icon and United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, standing in front of Delano's new maximum security prison. "Lets put some of the money in schools. Let's put some money in prevention."

California's 33rd prison -- known informally as "Delano II," officially as Kern Valley State Prison -- will open this month with 500 inmates.

Opening a new prison when schools, hospitals and libraries are being shuttered shows what's wrong with state spending, according to protest organizer Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a coalition of prison reform and human rights groups that also held protests in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Fresno. The state should spend its money on people before they end up prison, protesters said.

Kern Valley State Prison will be a model prison, said Margot Bach, spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, with all inmates
participating in education, work training or substance abuse programs. It cost $379 million to build and the state will spend $110 million to run it each year.

It may be the last entirely new prison the state builds, Bach said. In the future, expansion will be limited to existing prisons, she said.

At full capacity, the prison will house roughly 5,000 male inmates, all but 500 of which are maximum security. It will eventually employ 1,500 workers, and the first inmates arrive June 15.

"Just because they're closing schools in San Francisco doesn't mean we're getting more money," Bach said.

California had 163,074 prison inmates as of May. Roughly 30,000 of them are men in maximum security facilities.

And their numbers are increasing, Bach said. Once they're convicted, the Department of Corrections has no choice but to house them.

"I don't know what they want us to do with them," said Diane Irwin, public information officer at the new Delano prison. "We don't make the laws here, all we do is enforce them."