California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger squandered a critical opportunity to reform California’s troubled prison system when he vetoed two prison bills this month, Human Rights Watch said today.
The bills, which were vetoed on October 1, 2004, would have increased public knowledge about prison conditions by providing clergy and the media the right to interview inmates and to report to the public the conditions inmates face while incarcerated. The Governor’s explanations for the vetoes do not take into consideration the clear connection between limited public information and prison abuse.
“The Governor’s vetoes make no sense,” said Kate Frankfurt, California Advocate for Human Rights Watch. “Schwarzenegger says he is committed to better prisons and to ending the code of silence that allows the mistreatment of inmates. But now he has backed correction officials’ efforts to silence clergy and press by restricting their ability to allow the voices of inmates to be heard.”
Human Rights Watch said that one of the vetoed bills, AB 2946, would have permitted prison and jail chaplains to expose publicly what they witness during their work. The importance of such public testimony was demonstrated in 2003, when Catholic lay chaplain Javier Stauring spoke out about the appalling treatment suffered by children held in the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail. Stauring’s descriptions, corroborated by Human Rights Watch and other organizations, generated a public outcry and led the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to declare Men’s Central Jail to be an unfit facility for inmates under the age of eighteen. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department retaliated against Stauring by barring him from continuing to minister to children behind bars. The governor’s veto means that clergy can continue to be banned from prison facilities, if they speak out against abuses.
Governor Schwarzenegger also vetoed SB1164, a bill designed to restore adequate media access to California’s prison inmates. The bill would have overturned regulations adopted by the Department of Corrections in 1996, which severely limit the ability of journalists to interview prison inmates.
“It is not coincidental that some of the California prison system’s worst scandals have occurred since the Department choked off media access to inmates,” said Frankfurt. “Abuses flourish when inmates can’t tell the world what is going on.”
Human Rights Watch said that Governor Schwarzenegger’s decisions to effectively gag clergy members from speaking on behalf of the incarcerated and shut the media out of state prisons has moved California two steps further down the path toward more scandalous abuses like the suicides in the California Youth Authority (CYA) and the inmate homicides that have become frequent in the Men’s Central Jail.
“It is hard to understand the governor’s claim that more information about conditions prisoners face while in California’s correctional facilities will somehow jeopardize public safety,” said Frankfurt. “What is clear is that vetoing openness and accountability will benefit neither inmates nor law enforcement. When inmates, both juvenile and adult, are denied the right to speak to interested parties, human rights abuses are all too often the result.”
