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Bet you didn't see that headline coming! (Or, anyway, those of you who know my work at Prison Law Blog.) Probably my least favorite op-ed template is "omg California is soooo fiscally irresponsible!" and my second-least favorite is "now for fun, let's bash government workers!" so obviously, this op-ed by Allysia Finley really aroused my ire last week.The conceit of the op-ed is to juxtapose the salary and benefits of a California prison officer with those of a Harvard graduate. Upon reading this comparison, we are apparently meant to be outraged, or maybe to guffaw -- actually I'm not entirely sure. (For one thing, what in the world do we learn by comparing the average salary of all Harvard grads, across all professions and locations, with the actual starting salary of one fairly narrowly defined profession in one very particular state?)But hey, I get it -- she's making an outlandish comparison for shock value! And hey, who likes prison guards anyway? And aren't they responsible for California's three-strikes law and any number of other horrible, terrible, no good things?Well, no, actually I don't get it. The comparison is neither amusing nor informative. It's basically just mean. The conceit of the piece asks you, the reader, to adopt the curiously crabbed persona of a teenager who has the choice to go to Harvard but, instead of being grateful for that world-class opportunity, is mainly concerned about what kinds of bonuses she'll be pulling in 20 years from now. To this imagined interlocutor, Finley winks knowingly: Isn't it funny, she implies, to think that these other, uneducated, poor people can actually also make a decent salary! And enjoy a few weeks of paid vacation! With no credentials! Without even going to Harvard!Here's just one sample of Finley's disingenuous nonsense:
As a California prison guard, you can make six figures in overtime and bonuses alone. While Harvard-educated lawyers and consultants often have to work long hours with little recompense besides Chinese take-out, prison guards receive time-and-a-half whenever they work more than 40 hours a week. One sergeant with a base salary of $81,683 collected $114,334 in overtime and $8,648 in bonuses last year, and he's not even the highest paid.Yes, I'm sure "Harvard-educated lawyers and consultants" the world over would be dying to switch places with California prison officers, if they only knew that they could have been raking in $8,000 bonuses all this time. Also: Do you know what "overtime" consists of when you are a prison guard? Hours and hours of your life! Spent inside a prison! Doing the soul-crushing labor of corraling other human beings! Instead of, you know, playing baseball with your kids, or whatever else you might want to be doing. Who wouldn't give up late-night doc review and expense-account dim sum for that? Quelle luxe!Look, the solution to the high cost of prison staff is to put fewer men and women in prison. If, however, a state is going to put itself into the business of the custodial care of hundreds of thousands of men and women, then it's going to have to hire people to oversee them. And, you know what, it's going to have to pay them semi-decently, and it's also going to have to allow them vacation. So what if it's seven weeks of vacation? So what if they retire at 55? Considering what Philip Zimbardo taught us that being a prison guard does to a person after even a day or two, I wouldn't exactly call that a sweetheart deal.Meanwhile, here's a 2007 speech by the remarkable Jody Lewen, who runs the Prison University Project at San Quentin, and, in that capacity, actually works with prison officers every day. You should read the speech in full, as it's an inspiring countermodel to Finley's dismissive condescension. But especially read the part towards the end, where Lewen discusses an eye-opening conversation she once had with a leader within the CCPOA. As Lewen notes, many California prisons are located in rural communities where families struggle to cobble together community-college fees and health-insurance premiums for their children. Where entry into the C.O. training program that Finley mocks can offer a rare ticket to a middle-class life. It is, indeed, a problem that California legislators and voters have prioritized punitive criminal-justice policies at such great fiscal cost and, more importantly, at such great human cost. It is a problem that the political economy of California has rewarded the CCPOA so handsomely over the past 30 years for its advocacy of ever-more punitive sentencing laws. It is a problem that California has nearly 170,000 men and women in prison. The CCPOA did not create those problems so much as it's astutely exploited the system that made those problems possible. The CCPOA is a lobby, working within a system that especially rewards lobbies whose counter-constituencies are powerless and voiceless. That's not limited to prisons. It's not limited to California. The legendary power of the CCPOA in Sacramento is a symptom, not the disease.
