Corrections¿ expenditures increased by 32% in the past 3 years to $10 billion; however, its ability to determine the impact various factors such as overcrowding, the transition of the health care function to a fed. court-appointed receiver, escalating overtime costs, and the presence of aging inmates have on the cost of its operations is limited by a lack of information. Nearly 25% of California¿s inmate population is incarcerated under the three strikes law, which requires individuals to serve longer terms. This report estimates that the increase in sentence length for inmates incarcerated under the three strikes law will cost the State $19.2 billion for the additional time these inmates are sentenced to serve. Charts and tables.

This book explores California’s prison system in the context of vocational education reform. For prisons in the early twenty-first century, ideologies of evidence-based management meant that reform efforts to change the purpose of prisons from punishment to rehabilitation through vocational education required “evidence” to justify policy prescriptions. Yet who determines what constitutes evidence? In political environments, solutions are typically pre-conceived, which means that the nature of the evidence collected is also preconceived. As a result, key assumptions about outcomes are often wished away to show improvement and be accountable. Through a detailed analysis interspersed with stories from the authors’ experiences “behind the wall” among California’s prison population, the authors challenge the nature of evidence-based research as used in the prison environment. In the process they describe the thorny problems facing reformers.