When Kenthy Porter was sentenced to prison 22 years ago, he knew he wanted to give back to the community. As a former gang member, he felt he had taken from his community, so while inside, he began advocating for causes like closing prisons, immigrant rights, and gender justice. Through his work, he learned that crime and imprisonment weren’t just driven by people’s individual behaviors—they were also driven by underlying factors such as poverty and racism.

While incarcerated at Chuckawalla Valley State Prison (CVSP) in southern California for six years, Porter advocated for more rehabilitative programs and to center the voices of people incarcerated there. He raised that there were not enough classes or spots in these programs, meaning that many people often got left out.

“Prisons are sometimes touted as places where people can rehabilitate themselves over a period of time and get out,” said Porter, who is now an inside policy fellow with the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Initiate Justice. “The vast majority of [the budget] goes to security, and very little goes to actually rehabilitating people. It’s actually a failed business model that only returns people largely the same way they came in, with modest education and even less insight into themselves.”

Porter remembered heat waves and power outages in CVSP, and during a deadly COVID-19 outbreak at the prison, more than 1,000 people contracted the virus. The prison closed in November, but Porter said it wasn’t the worst facility he’d experienced.

A coalition of more than 80 grassroots organizations across California is calling for the state to continue closing prisons and shift spending away from incarceration toward the resources and services that they say keep people safe, such as housing, health care, and jobs. The state has the second-largest prison population in the country.

“We want there to be less jails and less prisons in the state,” said Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB). “We want there to be less people in them because there’s too many, and we want that money to go toward things that we know protect and uplift communities.”

While the CURB coalition has been active for over 20 years, it began picking up speed in 2020 when it released the People’s Plan for Prison Closure, which called on California to close 10 prisons by the end of 2025. The coalition encouraged the state to prioritize closing the 10 worst prisons, identified based on surveys the group administered to incarcerated people. 

The coalition is now urging California Gov. Newsom to start by closing the California Rehabilitation Center in Riverside County, which it says has unsafe and deplorable conditions, such as rodent and cockroach infestations, unsafe drinking water, overcrowding, high temperatures, violence caused by staff, and unreliable program access. CURB has said the money instead should go to the critical economic, environmental, and health care needs of the Riverside community.

Following California’s public safety realignment initiative in 2011, in which nonviolent offenders in prisons were transferred to county jails, the state was able to decrease the prison population from 160,700 to about 90,000 people as of Feb. 5. Since then, California has closed three prisons and multiple yards, most recently CVSP.

Kaneda said that closing CVSP was a milestone in California’s approach to resolve rampant issues with the state’s prison system.

“The solution to our mental health crisis is mental health treatment centers; the solution to homelessness is housing, especially permanent supportive housing,” Kaneda said. “We need stronger reentry services. We need stronger job training. We need a stronger social safety net.”

Closures, not reforms

During their campaign, CURB and its member organizations have hit barriers with the state government, the largest being the governor. While Newsom wants to reform prisons with his “California Model,” which aims to implement international best practices to change the culture and improve conditions within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), CURB wants to close prisons completely. Kaneda said CURB is calling for releases, not transfers.

We just don’t believe you can fundamentally change the culture of something like the CDCR because the culture is violence.

Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget

“We just don’t believe you can fundamentally change the culture of something like the CDCR because the culture is violence,” Kaneda said. 

Last year, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have helped the corrections department lower its capacity by maintaining an average daily empty bed count. In his veto message, Newsom said the decision was made to give the department more control over what it deems the appropriate capacity.

“I think people get a little lost,” Kaneda said. “They can maybe take the first couple of steps like, ‘OK, well, let’s have prisons, but let’s have nice prisons. Let’s create kinder, gentler cages.’ There’s still so much that people have to unlearn about what actually keeps a community safe.”

He added, “We’re not sure if ‘reform’ is cutting it, and really not another dollar needs to come into this system.”

Reimagining carceral infrastructure

Michaé De La Cuadra, the statewide campaign coordinator with Budget2SaveLives, said that as California moves to close prisons, the communities where the prisons are based should get to decide what to do with them and “transform them into things that are actually benefiting our society communities, versus having people give their time and labor into places that are actually harming us.” 

Between 2000 and 2022, 21 states have closed a prison, and some have been repurposed for community or commercial use, according to a report from the Sentencing Project. Former prisons have turned into community centers, nonprofit office spaces, business parks, campgrounds, a whiskey distillery, and more. The Sentencing Project reports state that “community reinvestment acknowledges the collateral impacts of mass incarceration on many urban neighborhoods.”

“There’s so much better uses of funding that aren’t necessarily for carceral institutions or punishment,” De La Cuadra said. “There’s a lot more ways that we could be supporting our communities that would help us really strengthen the way that our society functions, like if we invested in housing or mental health services, or other services that are helping people enrich their lives.”

De La Cuadra said that closing down prisons also presents the opportunity to reimagine different “ways that we can really, truly get accountability or support people.” 

“I think that sounds more of a solution than constantly caging people up,” they said.

Kaneda said that CURB plans to continue pushing for prison closures through legislative advocacy, public education, media, rallies, community building, calling people on the phone, and collaborating with other movements. 

“You’re not going to see the demands for prison closures going anywhere until there’s no more prisons left to close,” Kaneda said.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor