FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—March 20th, 2012
Community Members Call for Restored Rights to People with Felony Convictions
Organizations Speak at Oakland City Council in Support of Resolutions to Support Prisoner Reentry
Press Contact: Isaac Ontiveros, Californians United for a Responsible Budget | Ph. 510 444 0484
What: Oakland City Council Meeting
When: Tuesday, March 20 2012, 6:30pm
Where: Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza Continue reading
California to dish out $602 million for jail construction
By Rina Palta | KALW News | March 8, 2012 |
Los Angeles will receive $100 million, as will Riverside and Orange counties. Smaller grants will go to Santa Barbara, Tulare, Stanislaus, Kings, Shasta, Sutter, Madera, and Imperial counties.
Originally authorized in 2007 under AB 900, the allocations were recently kicked into gear to help counties deal with increased responsibility for low-level offenders under AB 109, the state’s prison realignment plan.
VIA CBS Community Groups Reject LA County Bid For $100M Grant To Build New Jails
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — A number of Southland activist groups are opposing efforts by county officials to obtain state funding for jail upgrades and new jail construction.
KNX 1070′s Pete Demetriou reports they want Los Angeles County supervisors to reject a potential $100 million grant.
Mary Sutton of Californians United for a Responsible Budget said plans for a new women’s prison in Castaic and other projects are anything but a responsible use of taxpayer dollars.
“If there is construction dollars, what they should be building is housing, job training centers, drug rehab centers,” said Sutton. Continue reading
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE–February 24, 2012
LAO Suggests Billions of Dollars in Reductions to AB900 and Possible Prison Closures
Contact: Isaac Ontiveros, Californians United for a Responsible Budget | Phone: 510-517-6612
Oakland–In its recent assessment of Governor Brown’s realignment plan, Refocusing CDCR After the 2011 Realignment, California’s Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) suggested that the Legislature examine reducing prison expansion plans and closing prisons. The report also calls for a moratorium on building new prison hospital beds and points out the need to recalibrate rehabilitation programs to meet the needs of those remaining in state prisons. Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a statewide coalition working to reduce the number of prisons and the number of people in prisons and jails in California has been recommending many of the same changes for years. Continue reading
LET’S TELL FRESNO COUNTY “NO” TO MORE JAIL BEDS
MONDAY – FEB 20, Beginning: 11:00 A.M.
IN FRONT OF THE FRESNO COUNTY JAIL (M STREET & FRESNO STREET)
WE NEED MORE…
USE ALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION BY
JOIN: CALIFORNIA PRISON MORATORIUM PROJECT, CALIFORNIANS UNITED FOR RESPONSIBLE BUDGET (c.u.r.b.) NNIA, and MANY MORE COMMUNITY MEMBERS AND ORGANIZATIONS
SAY NO TO JAIL EXPANSION
IN SAN MATEO!
For month’s Sheriff Monks has been pushing forward a massive jail expansion proposal in San Mateo. According to the ACLU of Northern California, 71% of the people in the county’s jails are being held while they wait for a hearing or a trial. This means that many of these people are in jail because they are too poor to afford bail.
Help us demand real solutions for San Mateo County by pushing for the County to support reentry and reduce the number of people in the jail instead of wasting millions of dollars to build a new one!
By Kathleen Miles | 01/25/2012 | The Huffington Post
“No new jails! No new jails!” These were the rallying cries of about two hundred protestors Tuesday as the LA Board of Supervisors met to consider expanding the county jail system.
As CBS reports, protestors demanded that the $1.5 billion that would go into Sherriff Lee Baca’s plan to rebuild Men’s Central Jail be spent instead on recidivism prevention, jobs, education and public safety.
Protester Mary Sutton said to CBS, “We need to prevent people from going into cages rather than building more cages.” She continued, “Do not build a new prison. Because what I know is if you build them you’ll fill them, and you’ll overfill them.” Continue reading
For Immediate Release—January 24, 2012
Press Contact: Isaac Ontiveros, Californians United for a Responsible Budget | 510. 517.6612
Hundreds Turn Out to Oppose Massive LA County Jail Expansion
Los Angeles— Over two hundred community members showed an enthusiastic display of opposition to the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Department’s move to expand LA County’s jails. After noting much community pressure, the Supervisors immediately backed down from the $1.4 billion dollar expansion plan that Sheriff Baca proposed in October. While the supervisors did not decide to withdraw the county’s application for state AB 900 Phase 2 jail construction funding, they did slow the pace on the commissioning of a $5.7 million report on possible jail expansion. Continue reading
VIA Sacremento Bee Inmates at Valley State Prison for Women (VSPW) have flooded the office of Madera County District 2 Supervisor David Rogers with letters expressing their concerns and fears over the state’s plan to convert the prison to a men’s facility.
“These concerns,” Rogers said, “range from losing valuable rehabilitative programs and the potential of being housed near women who have threatened their safety.”
Recent numbers show about 3,000 women are housed in VSPW, Rogers said, which is 150 percent of design capacity. At Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), the second women’s prison located in Chowchilla, there are about 3,400 inmates, 180 percent of design capacity, Rogers said. The only other women’s facility, California Institute for Women (CIW), houses almost 2,000 inmates and was designed for 1,200. Continue reading
For Immediate Release—January 23, 2012
Hundreds Rally Against $1.4 Billion LA Jail Expansion
Press Contact: Isaac Ontiveros | Californians United for a Responsible Budget | 510. 517.6612
What: Press Conference, Rally
When: Tuesday January 24, 10am
Where: 500 West Temple St., Kenneth Hall Main entrance
Los Angeles—Hundreds of LA residents will be converging on Tuesday’s LA County Board of Supervisors meeting to protest Sheriff Lee Baca’s proposal to spend $1.4 Billion to expand the county’s notorious jail. As part of the statewide Californians Untied for a Responsible Budget (CURB) alliance, organizations and community members will hold a press conference and rally before the meeting to speak out against the grave social and economic impacts of widening LA’s jail system. Residents and organizations will also advocate for alternative ways the county could use resources to address public safety, recidivism, and reentry resources without relying on incarceration. Continue reading
JAN 24th: MOBILIZE TO STOP JAIL EXPANSION AND SAVE LA COUNTY! For Immediate Release – January 19, 2012
Los Angeles Residents Oppose $1.4 Billion Jail Expansion: 1,000 Sign Petition, Urge Supervisors to Vote Against Sheriff’s Plan
Los Angeles –1,000 individuals and organizations affiliated with the statewide coalition Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) submitted a petition this morning urging Supervisors to Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to vote against a massive jail expansion plan at their upcoming meeting on January 24th. LA County Sherriff Lee Baca’s plan would cost $1.4 billion to build and $1.26 billion in interest payments. Continue reading
LA Supervisors: Stop the Costly Jail Expansion in Los Angeles!
In response to the realignment of prisoners to the county jails. L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca has proposed a $1.4 billion expansion to Los Angeles County jails. This expansion would add 393 expensive and unneeded beds to LA’s jails. Realignment should be utilized to expand community programs and alternatives to incarceration not to build more cages.
For Immediate Release—January 5, 2012
Californians Call Brown’s Budget a Mixed Bag, Demand Further Reduction in Prison Spending to Save Social Services
Oakland CA— Governor Brown’s surprise budget unveiling today has Californians calling for additional cuts to the corrections budget to prevent even further slashing of welfare, childcare, healthcare, education, and job opportunities. The 2012-2013 proposal, which includes $8.887 billion in General Fund spending for Corrections, comes the same week as severe trigger cuts from last year’s budget and just days before 25 Counties are due to submit funding requests to build $600 million worth of jails across the state. Continue reading
Nearly 130,000 bodies are currently caged in for-profit or privately managed “correctional” facilities in the United States, a figure that accounts for 16.4% of federal and 6.8% of state populations.
Since 2000, moreover, the number of extant for-profit and privately contracted penal institutions has skyrocketed by approximately 120% during a time in which the population of “public” federal and state facilities has grown four times as slowly. And although federal and state expenditures on prisons have mushroomed by72% over the last decade and now cost taxpayers $74 billion per annum, the two largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation), have together “earned” over $2.9 billion in profits since 2000. Continue reading
