Transcriber: Delia Cohen Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
He's the former Secretary of CDCR.
He's the current executive director of California State Association of Counties.
Please welcome Mr. Matt Cate.
(Applause)
Thank you.
It's good to be back.
In 1994, two events occurred,
which over time, would conspire to place me
in charge of the largest prison system in the free world,
the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Those events would also teach me a lesson
about why conservatives should hate prison overcrowding.
The first event was personal.
In 1994, I left private practice and went to work as a prosecutor
at the Sacramento County District Attorney's office.
It was a job I loved from day one.
The trials were challenging, thrilling.
The subject matter was fascinating,
and as a public safety conservative,
as a "tough on crime" prosecutor,
I believed that by doing my job
and sending people to prison for as long as possible,
I was making my community a safer place.
The other event in 1994 was political.
That year California voters passed the Three Strikes Initiative.
The legislature took notice
and passed their own series of "tough on crime" bills,
greatly expanding the tools that people like me and my colleagues had,
and we used those tools to great effect,
sending one person after another to state prison for long periods of time
including one person I remember in particular
who I sent to prison for 25 to life
for selling a very small rock of cocaine to an undercover cop.
He may still be here today.
Fast forward ten years.
I hadn't thought a thing about any of those inmates,
about any of you,
when I got a call from the new Governor of the state of California.
And it went a little like, "Matt, this is Arnold."
(Laughter)
"I want you to be Inspector General."
(Laughter)
I didn't know what that was,
but how do you say "no" to the Terminator?
So, I went from, at that time a public corruption prosecutor
working for the Department of Justice, to being California's Inspector General.
My job was to inspect the prisons
but also to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in these prisons.
And so, my team and I show up, and I was shocked by what I found.
You see, those people that were convicted and sent to prison in 1994
were joined by those sent to prison in '95
and were joined by those sent to prison in '96, and so on.
And so, when we arrived, my team and I,
we found, not only the cells were all full,
but the gymnasiums were triple-bunked,
and there were inmates in the hallways.
How many remember those days?
In fact, the place we are right now,
where this TEDx event is happening,
at one point looked like that.
And here's what I learned:
crowded prisons are something that conservatives should hate,
especially if you're a fiscal conservative
because crowded prisons are expensive prisons.
Here's the budget during the time I was Inspector General.
As you can see, over those short years,
the budget at CDCR went up four billion dollars.
Why is that?
Because every time we add six inmates, we add one staff.
And if we can't hire fast enough, we pay overtime.
And, not only that, but we have to increase our infrastructure.
We need to build more water treatment plants.
We need to expand our power plants.
We need to bring in trailers to provide clinical space.
We need to send more inmates out to hospitals
because we can't hire doctors fast enough,
and those hospitals are expensive.
And when you can't control your system, you get sued.
And you end up with 18 class action lawsuits
governing almost everything you're trying to do.
And all that is very expensive.
At the end of this period in 2008,
I became agency Secretary over Corrections,
and I started to have conversations with my colleagues in the Cabinet,
people who ran other systems in California.
And I began to realize that the world was bigger
than just public safety in prisons.
And the more money we were spending here, the less we were spending elsewhere.
In fact,
if you look back over time,
at one point California spent 14 percent of our budget
on the world's best university system,
and four percent on prisons.
Fast forward to the present,
and you can see those numbers are almost reversed.
And it occurs to me, as a fiscal conservative,
that I hate the fact that we are now underfunding our colleges
and short-changing our future so that we can spend more money on prisons.
But, ultimately, prisons are about public safety,
and public safety comes first regardless of the cost.
And so what about that?
Well, It turns out overcrowded prisons are also violent prisons.
We can chart it, and show that as crowding went up,
assaults went up.
As Secretary of Corrections, I was in charge of 60,000 staff members,
same as Richard Branson.
(Laughter)
Mine just all wore green.
(Laughter)
And I loved those men and women; they did a great job every day.
But it was impossible to run a safe system for staff
when we were at 200 percent overcrowding.
And also, being responsible for the well-being of inmates,
both under statute and as a human being with a belief system,
I realized I couldn't do justice to the inmates as well
in terms of their safety.
And now, beyond what happens here,
it's also the case that I wasn't really even protecting our communities.
Because you see,
95 percent of you are eventually going to leave here,
and if the prison system does a lousy job of helping you transform your life
and become ready to be productive,
why we've learned that two thirds of you will return here,
and there will be new victims.
And that doesn't make sense to a public safety conservative.
So, what do we do?
Well, first we have to look at the problem.
See, I came from a generation before XBox, before PS whatever number,
when we sat unbuckled in the back of stationwagons
like you're supposed to on car trips.
(Laughter)
And we played dopey games like this.
The key to this game is to get all the numbers in order,
but you've got to have a blank space.
In the prisons, we lost our blank space.
And so, we couldn't get inmate Jones
into the drug and alcohol program at Solano that he needed
because there was an inmate in that bunk
who needed to be at the college program at Ironwood,
and I couldn't move them both.
And so, we shoved tiles against each other for years.
So, what do we do? Build more prisons.
Here's what happened when we tried that
We built 50,000 prison beds over 20 years -
22 prisons at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
And, for every prison bed we built, two inmates came,
and we fell farther and farther behind.
Now, I believe in building prisons to replace antiquated facilities.
We have an overcrowded jail system.
We need to build prisons and jails where there's treatment space,
and where there's humane conditions.
But we can't just build our way out of the problem.
We have to do something smarter than that.
So, what do we need to do?
Number one, science has progressed dramatically in public safety.
We now can do a much better job
predicting, not only risk for recidivism, but risk for flight and risk for violence.
Did you know that in my current role
as the executive director of the Association of Counties
I found out that approximately 60 percent of people in jail
are not there serving a sentence for a crime they've committed?
They're there because they're too poor to put up bail.
Wouldn't it be smarter to do a risk assessment,
decide who's at real risk for flight or risk for violence,
keep them in and then let the rest out?
I think so. We need more room.
How many of you are the same person you were when you started?
Not very many.
And our risk assessments can tell that.
We need to use those to make better decisions
about your lives as well.
Secondly, we need to do a much better job, now that we have room.
I thank Governor Brown for public safety realignment
for addressing much of the crowding problem,
but now we need to take advantage of it
and use risk-based and needs-based systems
to put the right inmate in the right program in the right time.
And here's the final point.
We have to invest in aftercare.
The science tells us that a program in prison
may reduce your recidivism by five percent.
But if you combine it with an effective aftercare program,
if someone's there to help you reintegrate,
we can reduce recidivism by 50 percent down to 34 percent.
Isn't that something worth investing in?
I think so.
(Applause)
Thank you.