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GUESTS: Vanessa Huang, Campaign Director of Justice Now, Rose Braz, Director with Critical Resistance

Last Friday, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation would be forcibly moving between 5,000 and 7,000 California prison inmates out of state due to overcrowding. Currently, California’s prison population is nearly double capacity with roughly 172,000 inmates. Privately run prisons in Indiana, Arizona, Tennessee, and Oklahoma are likely to receive a bulk of California’s forcibly transferred inmates. Last October, the state signed contracts with private sector prisons to incarcerate over 2,000 of these overflow inmates. Critics of the forced transfers have denounced the move on the grounds of being illegal and irresponsible. Two state employment unions have challenged the contracts in court and the lawsuit is scheduled to begin on February 16th. Schwarzenegger’s move enjoys Republican Party support as assemblyman Todd Spitzer said, “This is prison, these are prisoners, and they don’t get to say where they’re going to do their time.” The Governor also urged the State Legislature to approve his prison reform agenda which includes the expansion of prisons in the state to house an additional 78,000 inmates.

For more information, visit www.justicenow.org and www.criticalresistance.org. You can call Critical Resistance Los Angeles at 323-238-0596 or email austin@criticalresistance.org