Prison Love.

California can’t afford to keep 56-year-old Beverly Henry in prison. But those who work there just won’t let her go. Once a struggling Venice Beach drug addict, she was sent to prison in 1998 for 15 years for selling a $20 bag of heroin to an undercover officer in order to support her habit. Taxpayers know that drug treatment is cheaper than prison — that’s why they voted for Proposition 36 in 2000, which would send a case like hers to rehab instead — but back when Henry got popped, the state lacked the minimum resources necessary to treat drug addiction, so Henry ended up in Chowchilla at the Central California Women’s Facility.

In Chowchilla, she struggles to survive intolerable overcrowding and a health-care system so deadly it’s been taken over by the feds, and her continued incarceration is costing state taxpayers $34,000 per year, every year, with no relief in sight.

Henry’s case is not unique either. More than 70 percent of the women in California’s prisons are serving time for nonviolent property or drug offenses. Most are black, like Henry, or other minorities, and many have children and families, and for most, prison will provide them with almost no resources to change their lives when they get out. In fact, it will make their situation infinitely worse.

No one benefits from the system as it exists today — no one, that is, except the state’s powerful prison guards’ union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

Read the entire article from Pasadena Weekly. It's long but a worthwhile read for those interested in the impact the prison guard's union has over the politicians and the system.

If we build prisons, they will come. Only providing facilities without addressing the real issues will mean these prisons will fill up and we'll just have to build more.