The exact cause of the 11-hour riot that broke out Aug. 8 at the California Institution for Men in Chino, Calif., won’t be known until an official investigation by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is completed. However, to some criminal-justice experts the violence that erupted at the facility, located about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, was an inevitable consequence of a state prison system long hobbled by massive overcrowding, program cuts and understaffed facilities. And given the state’s ongoing budget woes ”” with $1.2 billion in cuts mandated to the prison budget ”” the situation is likely to only get worse.
“The overcrowding is the first issue,” says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif. “You’re talking about hundreds of men moved into triple bunks in what used to be gyms and cafeterias. They’re not even cells. They’re just empty places where we’re shoving people.” According to the most recent statistics from the CDCR, California’s 33 state prisons house 154,649 prisoners in facilities designed to hold just 84,271 prisoners. The Chino prison is among the worst, with 5,877 prisoners in a facility designed to hold 2,976.