Town meeting scheduled to rally the community
Several organizations that oppose the state’s conversion of Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla into a men’s facility are uniting to host a community workshop in June.
Advocates have begun passing out flyers promoting the “town hall” event that will feature presentations about alternatives to having a prison in town, said organizer Debbie Reyes of the California Prison Moratorium Project.
“The community doesn’t want to have a high security men’s prison, they want to stop the entire conversion,” she said. “The purpose of the town hall is to talk to the community about what happens if the (female) prison does empty.”
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced in January that it would convert VSPW into a men’s prison because the female prison population is expected to drastically decline through realignment...
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Vally State Prison for Women
While the goal of these orginizations is certainly honerable, there is no way that any of them are going to sway the decisions made by CDCR. You would have to either be grossly misinformed or simply delusional to believe any different. If Valley State Prison remains a womens facility, it will be because they can't find alternative housing for the female inmates housed there. The Department of Corrections has based it's projections on the assumption that there will be very few if any new commitments and very little recidivism over the next few years while they are mass-releasing habitual criminals onto the streets. Considering the fact that the state has very little control over the county courts and keeping in mind that they are the ones handing down the sentences, that assumption is arguably every bit as delusional. Anyone can read the local papers and see that the crime rates have gone through the roof since the inception of AB109. It is one of the most dangerous, ridiculous, ill- conceived peices of legislation in the history of California. During Governor Browns last tenure, our state saw the highest crime rate in it's history, and one must wonder if he's doing his dead level best to set a new record. The bottom line is that money has become far more important than public safety and that's just the sad reality.