NEWSBYKAMALA HARRIS

[Editor's Note: Kamala Harris is currently the District Attorney of San Francisco, the first woman to be elected to the office in the city.  She is a candidate for Attorney General of California in 2010, and we're excited to have her guest blog about an innovative approach she has taken to addressing a chronic problem in San Francisco, which impacts all of California: prisoner re-entry.]

When the California State Legislature reconvenes Monday, dealing with the corrections crisis will no doubt be on the top of everyone's "to do" list. The Governor signed a budget requiring a $1.2 billion reduction in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget, and a panel of three federal judges recently ordered a cap on the state prison population that could result in the release of more than 40,000 inmates. If ever there was a time to think outside the box and break with the approaches of the past, the time is now. We have to do something different.

Over the last thirty years, California's prison population has soared. In 1980, California had a prison population of about 24,000 in a state of 24 million. Today we have an inmate population of 172,000 out of 36 million people. This means that since 1980, our population has grown by 50% while our prison population has grown 617%.

Today, the majority of those inmates are not first-time offenders. Each year, approximately 70 percent of those released from California prisons commit another offense, resulting in the highest recidivism rate in the nation. These repeat offenses are preventable crimes that claim more victims and harm communities' quality of life. It costs on average more than $10,000 to prosecute just one felony case, and about $47,000 per year to house each inmate in prison. Every time an inmate is released and commits a new crime, local and state jurisdictions pay those costs over and over again. Most importantly, individuals and communities pay the highest price when they are re-victimized by crime. To keep our communities safe and use public money wisely, we must insist that people coming out of the criminal justice system become productive citizens and stay out.

In San Francisco, I have developed a smart on crime approach: we must be tough on serious and violent offenders while we get just as tough on the root causes of crime. In my office, we have raised felony conviction rates and sent more violent offenders to state prison, at the same time we have launched innovative, cost effective approaches to reduce recidivism and break the cycles of crime.