Mike Davis on the Evils of Unionized Prison Guards (was Re: Populism as Masquerade)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Marta Russell wrote:
>> I'd add to this the prison guard union in California- which has tremendous
>> wealth and for all practical purposes owns both parties -  but has been a
>> most backwards corrupt force in the state.
>
>Not the least of the mistakes -- one might almost say crimes -- of
>the AFL-CIO is that AFSCME counts prison guards as workers.
>I live only 35 miles from the Illinois prison at Pontiac Illiinois -- and
>I do believe the guards there are the most vicious "gang" in the
>state of Illinois. They have about as much right to be accepted as
>workers as the guards at Buchenwald.
>
>Carrol

Mike Davis wrote in _Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of
Disaster_ (NY: Metropolitan Books, 1998):

*****   Staff at Calipatria [State Prison] speak with measured awe of CCPOA
[California Correctional Peace Officer's Association] president Don Novey,
a former Folsom prison guard, who has made the Correctional Officers the
most powerful union in the state.  Under his leadership, the CCPOA has been
transformed from a small, reactive craft union into the major player
shaping criminal justice legislation and, thereby, the future of the
California penal system.  Part of the secret of Novey's success has been
his willingness to pay the highest price for political allies.  In 1990,
for example, Novey contributed nearly $1 million to Pete Wilson's
gubernatorial campaign, and CCPOA now operates the second most generous PAC
in Sacramento. [96]

Novey has also leveraged CCPOA's influence through his sponsorship of the
so-called victims' rights movement.  Crime Victims United, for example, is
a satellite PAC receiving 95 percent of its funding from CCPOA.  Through
such high-profile front groups, and in alliance with other law enforcement
lobbies, Novey has been able to keep Sacramento in a permanent state of
law-and-order hysteria.  Legislators of both parties trample each other in
the rush to put their names at the top of new, tougher anticrime measures,
while ignoring the progressive imbalance between the number of felons
sentenced to prison and the existing capacity of Department of Corrections
facilities. [97]

This cynical competition has had staggering consequences.  Rand Corporation
researcher Joan Petersilia found that "more than 1,000 bills changing
felony and misdemeanor statutes" had been enacted by the legislature
between 1984 and 1992.  Taken together, they are utterly incoherent as
criminal justice policy, but wonderful as a stimulus to the kind of
carceral Keynesianism that has tripled both the membership and the average
salary of the CCPOA since 1980.  While California's colleges and
universities were shedding 8,000 jobs, the Department of Corrections hired
26,000 new employees to guard 112,000 new inmates.  As a result, California
is now the proud owner of the third largest penal system in the world
(after China and the United States as a whole). [98]

[96]  Cf. _LAT_ 6 February 1994; Joe Dominick, "Who's Guarding the Guards?"
_Los Angeles Weekly_ 2 September 1994; and Vincent Schiraldi, "The Undue
Influence of California's Prison Guards' Union," _In Brief_ (Center on
Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco), October 1994.

[97]  Ibid.

[98]  Joan Petersilia, "Crime and Punishment in California," in James
Steinberg et al. (eds.), _Urban America: Policy Choices for Los Angeles and
the Nation_ (Santa Monica, 1992).

(415-6)   *****

Yoshie