To be submitted to the Urban Studies and Planning Department of University of California, San Diego
Jennifer K. Tran jkt001@ucsd.edu
USP Senior Sequence
February 25, 2010
Abstract: The specific purpose for this critical discourse analysis of the Las Colinas expansion controversy reveals how concerns for crime and environmental justice in San
Diego are negotiated in ways that hide historical urban angst of racism, classism, and sexism. As the County argues for the expansion of Las Colinas on the basis of overcrowded and inadequate facilities, Santee’s appeals to NIMBYism socially construct communities that are “deserving” and “undeserving” of prisons; thus, re-perpetuating structural, spacial, and civic racial inequalities. Interweaving findings drawn from newsletters, government documents, city reports, web blogs in opposition of the expansion, and interviews conducted with County, city officials, and local residents yielded a complex struggle for juridical dominance through the dialogics of environmental justice which in no way challenge the ideological effectiveness of prisons.
Instead of continuing San Diego’s history of catering to the needs of its community, city, or county, now is a pivotal moment for planners to begin to engage critically, ethically, and philosophically in prison planning.
Keywords: Prison industrial complex, land use planning, NIMBY, Las Colinas Detention
Facility of Santee, discourse analysis
Introduction
On June 25, 2009, the San Diego Union Tribune put out an official report that stated:
Despite protests from more than 20 speakers and the threat of possible legal action by
Santee, a majority of supervisors agreed that the 1960s-era jail needs replacing and that the existing site is the best place to do it…
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“It seems to me that you're rewarding those that break the law and you're punishing the people who live in Santee,” said Elaine Murphy, 84, who has lived in Santee for nearly
20 years. “No matter how much lipstick you put on this, it's still a jail and it's still an expansion right in the middle of town…”
Many of the Santee residents and city officials who testified against the project said they understand the need for upgrades at Las Colinas but that the center of their city isn't an appropriate location for the larger facility. They said they fear that expanding the jail from 16 to 45 acres will undermine the city's economic progress and lower property values. (San Diego Tribune, 2009)
The recent county decision to allocate $300 million dollars for the expansion of Las
Colinas Women detention facility has stirred up controversy amongst the Santee Community.
Opponents of the plan claim that the County is proceeding with its plan despite its multiple violations of the California Environmental Quality Act. Santee residents continue to resist the expansion of the prison based on safety, negative economic impacts, traffic congestion, misuse of taxpayer funds, incompatible land use, and lack of consideration for alternative locations.
Such an investment during the current recession against the community’s will has drawn much media coverage. The debate between the County and the Santee community illustrates a plea for economic development as well as the resistance to the prison presence itself. Meanwhile, the other party that is also affected remains unrepresented (the inmates) and lies outside of the planning process of prison expansion.
My research provides a descriptive study for community mobilization and public participation in the land use planning process of the recent and ongoing hot-button issue of the
Las Colinas jail expansion located in Santee, CA. In addition, I aim to capture the political strategies employed by the residents affected by this decision addition. My work invites all planners to join the Las Colinas expansion debate by making sure that all members of any planning decision are considered and valued before finalizing development project.
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Literature Review
Legal scholars like Chang and Thompkins (2002) have linked the empirical data to explain prison studies and the soaring incarceration rates as an effect of economic conditions and increasing income inequality, racial tension, political conservatism, anti-crime legislation, and economic globalization during this period. Tracing back to the Reagan Administration, legislation opened up opportunities for a free labor market, opposed union labor movements, and cut back welfare social programs in order to allocate public funds into The Comprehensive
Crime Control Act of 1984 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and 1988 to support the war on crime (Parenti 1998). The total spending on state prisons surged by 74 percent in only four years, from $4.5 billion in 1980 to $7.7 billion in 1984 (Donahue, 1989). According to Scalia’s (2001) investigation on trends in the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the multiple billions of dollars invested in hiring thousands of police officers and building of mass prisons resulted in a 1,000 percent increase of drug offenders in the federal and state prisons between 1980 and 1997. Forty-five percent of drug offenders are Latinos, 28 percent are African-Americans, and 25 percent are white (Scalia 2001). Rather than providing more opportunities for marginalized people, the U.S. has experienced a disproportionate amount of public spending on the War on Drugs and less for public education and social services.
More recent critics have argued against the failure of mentioning women in prison studies. While the global economy is has become increasingly dependent on cheap labor, in particular third world women who are willing to work for below acceptable wages; Meanwhile,
African American and Latino populations (both men and women) experienced higher unemployment because they are seen more likely to turn to illegal economies (Lawston 2008). documents the criminal statistics of differential gender incarceration:
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Although women only constitute about seven percent of the prison population, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the rate of women entering prisons has grown faster than that of men every year since 1981. For example, in a report for the Sentencing
Project, Mauer, Potler and Wolf (1999) show that between 1980 and 1997, the women’s prison population increased by 573 percent, from 12,300 to 82,800 women incarcerated in state and federal prisons nationwide. This contrasts with a 294 percent increase in rates of incarceration for men (Mauer, Potler and Wolf 1999). (Lawston, 2008)
The war on crime disproportionately affects women of color because they are more likely to commit drug offences out of economic necessity or desperation and also because they occupy the lower rungs on the drug trafficking ladder. Due to their economic circumstances, they are often less likely able to hire an attorney or they fear to testify against their male partners
(Lawston 2008) As documented in Lawston’s work, while more prisons were constructed in order to house these inmates, less public funds were actually used to rehabilitate or provide recidivist workshop for the women. Lawston as well as scholars like Irving, Gilmore, Hames-
Garcia, James, and Reynolds have recorded many encounters of sexual and verbal abuse, forced labor, and humiliation that prisoners have experienced and shared inside the facilities. Today correctional facilities function as ideological institutions to control and punish rather than prepare people of color to be productive citizens. All the details of federal and state spending on prisons and its connection to the increasing incarceration rate of poor people and ethnic minorities has inspired many rising scholars to critique the instability of capitalism and prison industries.
Moreover, proliferate prison building has created a profitable market for private firms in the past decade (Chang 2002). Scholarship has discussed American voters’ angst (at what critical scholars name to be the privatization of prisons) as they watch their tax dollars fuel the construction and expansion of prisons. As long as a state does not have any laws against the prohibition of private prisons, private firms are permitted to and (recently) encouraged to locate
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and develop prisons to meet the demands of overcrowded public prisons (Schneider 2000).
Current literature frames the prison industry in relation to economic development and mode of survival for rural areas that lack capital and governmental investment. Since the 1980s, economic restructuring in America resulted in the decreased demand for manufacturing, farming, and mining had gravely affected local agricultural production (Huling 2002). Studies show that many of the prisons that were being built in non-metropolitan areas. Between 1990 and 1999, 245 prisons were built in rural and small town communities -- with a prison opening somewhere in rural America every fifteen days (Huling 2002). Like any industry, prisons provide a market for local businesses can supply the internal needs of the facilities. Prisoners can also increase a city’s population as well as lower the town’s median income so that it can qualify for needs-based state funding. Rural small towns are becoming more dependent on prison industries for viable economic development and sustainability.
The review of the literature above discusses the advantages and disadvantages of prison planning through the perspective of nonprisoners. Current debates about the issue of planning prisons revolve around who deserves the final decision making authority to construct or expand a prison. Policy makers see prisons as an economic advantage while the community in which the decision affects is preoccupied with the detrimental effects on the social fabric and environment of their communities. The actual social function of prisons goes unchallenged. The players involved in the planning process rhetorically support the function of prisons and encourage the building of prison, just not in their towns. While the works of Gilmore (2007), Rodríguez (2006),
Haslam (2008), and Joy (2007) urge for prison studies to explore and value the inside perspective of incarcerated people and the families that are affected by prisons, it is Hames-Garcia (2004) who insists “not merely that the input of prisoners and dissidents is useful developing a critical
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theory of justice and freedom, but rather that it is necessary
” (xliii–xliv).” Hames-Garcia is calling for a more thorough and reflexive methodology in prison studies in a way that all people affected by prisons are included in the discussion.
The Influence
My research project was inspired by Boudreau’s (2006) methodology of the content analysis of the public’s literary responses to historical public punishments, to compose a discourse analysis of the widely controversy regarding the San Diego County’s decision to expand Las Colinas Detention facility for Women in Santee. Boudreau analyzes highly publicized cases such as the Fall River Murder” of 1832, the trial and executions following the
Haymarket riots, the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 and Emmett Till in 1955, and the contemporary executions of Gary Gilmore and Karla Faye Tucker to show how popular literary responses can destabilize the supposedly stabilizing force of punishment (Haslam, 2008). By closely examining the rich arguments against the expansion of Las Colinas I hope to bring to life the contradictions and instability of this particular NIMBY case in the context of today’s prison industrial complex.
As the third largest city in the nation and as an understudied city, I have chosen Santee as a descriptive reverse case study of community activism for environmental justice. While grassroots activism for environmental justice have represented the majority of poor and ethnic populations, I thought it would be worthwhile to compare and critique the mechanisms in while
Santee employed during this controversy in order to speak on the course/progression of land use planning, environmental justice, and the prison industrial complex. In order to contextualize and historicize Santee, a comparison of recent (2007) population data by ethnicity and income the city and the San Diego region as a whole is provided below.
Ethnicity (percentage of total population)
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Hispanic
Black
American Indian
Asian/Pac. islander
Other
Caucasian
Median Household
Income
San Diego Region
$68,388
San Diego Region
29%
5%
0.5%
10%
3%
52.5%
City of Santee
$78,250
City of Santee
13%
2%
0.6%
3%
3%
78.4%
Source: San Diego Association of Governments ( www.sandag.org
; accessed October 15, 2009)
The history of the environmental justice movement has been divided into natural resource conservationist, urban environmentalist, and global-social change environmentalists (Ford 2003).
“Not in my backyard” (NIMBY) attitudes were ascribed to environmental justice within the past two decades that addresses the relationships between social inequalities and the distribution of environmental hazards in our society. Experts in the field such as Pellow (2007), Giddicks
(2001), Roberts & Toffolon-Weiss (2001), and Pulido (1996) have laid out the foundation for environmental justice by providing empirical evidence of the unequal distributions of environmental quality and hazards along the dimensions of power, class, and race particularly in
African American, Latino, Native American, Asian American, and indigenous communities. The size and position of the new facility are serious sources of contention between the Sheriff’s
Department and the City of Santee. Sheriff’s Captain Donna Collier, Facility Commander for
Las Colinas stated in an article dated November 23, 2006 in The East County Californian that,
“Community members don’t like jails in their community, but they want us to arrest criminals – and when you arrest them, you have to put them somewhere.” She further stated that: “The space we have is very limited and will not meet needs for much longer.” The Las Colinas expansion is
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a case that is utilizing its environmental privilege to maintain an ideologically homogenous sense of community. Environmental privilege is best understood as the result from the combination of political, economic, and cultural power that grants one group amenities from the access of quality land. Scholars like Melosi (2000) and McGurty (1997) contend that contemporary grassroots battles in pursuit of environmental justice have been made direct linking between those factors and locations of environmental hazardous practices. It might have been less likely for Santee to gain political power to protest against the expansion if it was a poor city that was home to ethnic minorities.
Currently there has been no literature on the critical discourse analysis of prison planning that considers the inmates themselves. Most of the discourse as evident from the literature review discusses the evolution of the prison industry in America, various economic perspectives of the prison industry, or how research including the experience of incarceration and how it is essential to theoretical social justice. None so far, has delved into the documentation of the process of planning prisons and differentiating the stakeholders and their political agendas unseeable by the media scope which ignores the inmate perspective. My research aspires to take the audience into the upfront hot discussion of the expansion of Las Colinas as well as situating the debate in the context of social, historical, and political significance to reveal mainstream ideology and power relationships. The objective of my research is to uncover ideological assumptions that are hidden in the words of the residents of Las Colinas, in order to inspire current and future planners to resist and overcome various forms of power as well as to gain an appreciation that we also possess exercising power (whether we know it or not) to alter the world that we are dedicated to improving.
Research Design:
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The research strategy that was utilized in this project ranged from diverse evidence to capture the appeals that the city of Santee employed to justify their position in the debate. After I researched the ways residents participated in the planning process, I went on to critically analyze major themes that each respective party associated themselves with that gesture towards urban angst. Finally, I drafted a list of underlining questions which I juxtaposed against the city’s understanding of crime and social justice/realities based on their political stance on the jail expansion.
It was important to provide a thick description of the discourse around this subject matter in an uncritical objective manner. The first source of evidence consisted of newspapers that mentioned how the discourse of prisons or jail expansion in San Diego has been discussed historically. Tracing prison discourse from San Diego’s growth peak contextualized the current debate that allows the reader to notice similarities or changes in the way people understand the function of jails in San Diego. In addition, current newspaper articles in the San Diego Union
Tribune demonstrated how mass media was presenting the current hot issue in terms of how has funding for prisons and jails changed over the years. Articles extracted from the East County magazine and the local Santee newsletter diversified the concept of “public opinion” by zooming into the local population that was directly impacted by the Las Colinas jail expansion. Archival and current articles provided popular description of how the debate is being framed in the public imagination.
Another source of evidence that I relied upon for this project was official government reports from San Diego County and the City of Santee that were either in opposition or support of the jail expansion. Government reports were useful because unlike newspapers, such documents have been collaborated and edited by multiple committees or people with some
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authority of power. One can assume that for each official report that is released, much time and resources were invested in order to be assessed by the target audience. The two types of government documents (one prepared by the county while the other was produced by the city) present in-depth details for their political stance in the debate. Since I needed to understand different stakeholders’ concern for the jail expansion, these documents contained raw material for me to organize systems of relationality within the discourse of the jail expansion. I needed to know on what claims the parties were appealing to so that I could later have several main themes on which I could further analyze during my writing process. As I immersed myself in these documents, it was important that I familiarized myself with past official county-city land use planning agreements so that I could draw further connection between political will and urban planning ordinances and regulations.
In addition to official reports and newspaper articles, I also conducted a visual analysis of
Santee residents’ social networking websites that heavily opposed the jail expansion. Unlike the former types of evidence that were employed in the beginning stages, social networking websites contained pictures and colloquial terms that I found to cater more to the emotions of the public rather than holding any real political weight in the controversy. Social networking websites such as facebook, twitter, and special interest websites gestured toward the discursive practices that certain groups use as an outreach approach to gain broader support from people that are not at the forefront of the debates. Each website in which the residents and activist leaders mobilized showed how organized and passionate the city was and its commitment to keeping the expansion outside of Santee. Since my project was concerned about how public opinion regarding the jail expansion, these social networking websites were where I found the most uncensored comments
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related to the debate. In addition, this source of evidence enhanced my research because it allowed me insights on how the community defined itself in contrast to other cities.
Moreover, my research strategy would have been incomplete if I failed to conduct an interview with a planner that was involved in the jail expansion process as well as a different type of planner that was not a part of the project in order to get a different perspective. Since most of the county documents that I reviewed were prepared by Esther Daigneault, the
Environmental Planning Manager of the Department of Public Works for the County of San
Diego, I knew that she would be a great person to interview for my research. I wanted to interview a planner because I was curious about the role of a planner when dealing with an important urban planning issue such as jail expansion or relocation. Questions that I had I asked were, “What is the role of a city planner when it comes to planning jails?” The interviews were supposed to give me a better understanding of how planners intervene in the planning process when their opinions go against the grain of popular demand. While I am fully aware that reversing the ideological function of prison expansion/ development was an enormous task to take on as an individual or by any one entity, during my research I had hoped to find some inspiration from planners who had room to influence the way that society planned institutions such as jails and prisons. Unfortunately, due to the limitation of this research, I did not find it necessary to use the interviews in depth for analysis because my focus was on the roles of the county and the city in shaping the discourse of environmental justice and prison industrial complex.
The last stage of my methodology involved situating the arguments that each entity made in the context of crime and social justice/realities around the issue of jail expansion. Their arguments revealed their support for jail expansion without ever challenging the idea that jails
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ultimately rely on the overwhelmingly disproportionate incarceration of poor ethnic minorities in
America because they predominantly depicted themselves as the sole victims of the expansion project. For instance, the city of Santee proved to be adamant about the negative impacts that the expansion will have on their community, but they never advocated or suggested alternatives for spending public funds that did not directly advocate for real estate or lucrative land value exchange. This last part of the methodology was less focused on gathering new information, but rather it required more critical (re)reading of the evidence that was collected from the former two sections of my research strategy. Connecting arguments to respective historical and contemporary attitudes in environmental justice case studies was the larger method that I utilized and designed for my research.
Shortcomings in Research Strategy:
As discussed in my Transition Plan, the evidence that was gathered in my research design demonstrated the inability of the county, private developers, and the city and Santee residents to see the negative social and economic impacts that prisons and jails have on society. My findings brought about a larger critique or environmental justice and how the various parties that are involved understand it differently, especially when dealing with a controversial issue. While their understanding of environmental justice was different, each party failed in expand or consider social change as a part of their framework. Granted that all the evidence that I proposed to carry out in my Transition Plan and research design was feasible to collect, given the page limitation of this thesis, it was not possible to create comprehensive narratives for each party that was involved in the Las Colinas expansion debate.
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By the end, I was able to provide a descriptive study in between the county and the city in relation to their understanding and standards of environmental justice within the context of planning prisons. I decided to focus on the city’s active participation in the land use planning process, specifically with CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act is required by California for all developments to follow before proceeding). To my surprise, a close up examination of the legislative intricacies of CEQA was the key factor in my research. It helped me hone in on my research question more; thus, I had a better understanding of the direction that I wanted to take my thesis.
Analysis/Findings:
BRIEF HISTORY OF PRISON DEVELOPMENT IN SAN DIEGO
Rather than considering historical context in their position against the jail expansion, residents of Santee adopted grassroots strategies in effort to obtain “environmental justice.”
Although traditionally environmental justice has shifted from conservation of natural resources from the 1970s to contemporary civic battles against disproportionate distribution of physical environmental hazards in communities of minority/low-income populations (Ford, 2003). In their recent battle against the county’s proposed expansion of the Las Colinas Detention Facility, residents of Santee have expanded the definition of environmental justice as one of their main tools of resistance against the project. Unlike other grassroots activists who have acquired social change strategies in order to achieve environmental justice, Santee residents’ opposition strongly exemplifies NIMBY (Not-in –my- backyard) sentiment which mainly characterized the initial battles against the handling of toxic waste during the 1980s.
Historical discourse around prison planning in San Diego has revolved around who gets the final land-use decision making authority to construct or expand a prison. A brief summary of
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prison development history in San Diego was circulated in a newsletter in 1959. According to the article, the county had been denied and unqualified for federal funds to build prisons dating back as early as the 1910s (SDTribune, 7/19/59). At that period San Diego was barely recognized as a major city under the scope of the national radar. The city became gradually engineered by a handful of elitist businessmen who eventually dominated the architecture of San Diego’s civic culture and political economy. It was not until the early sixties that San Diego became prominent enough to receive federal funding for prisons. On September of 1964, the board of supervisors approved a project that dedicated $3 million to construct a county prison. Whether or not this type of spending could be explained by keystone national policies, the construction of prisons is usually a sign of urban growth because as a city diversifies and expands, questions and angst in regards to crime and order becomes more challenging to negotiate. During this same year, the federal government increased rates paid to the San Diego County for housing federal prisoners
(SDTribune, 07/11/1964). San Diego County had a unique relationship with both the state and the federal officials in the respect that the discussion of prison development did not involve civic engagement or participation.
Apart from relying on the State Board of Corrections for prison consultation, it is clear that
San Diego has not changed its practices involving prison development to only include city officials and representatives in the planning process of prison building. The Grand Jury, board of supervisors, and county sheriff have played a prominent role in determining city’s needs for prison development paid for in citizens tax dollars. Between 1960-1985, the San Diego county officials, board of supervisors and the State Board of Corrections engaged in a series of projects that led to the construction of several new detention facilities that were strategically positioned
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across the entire county to address the problem of prison overcrowding and inefficient transportation costs in the main prison located downtown.
CITY OF SANTEE:
While this report analyzed the main discursive practices that were employed in order to achieve their goal of representation in the politics of this particular case of land use planning, three outstanding ways in which the city mobilized together on this issue were identified as an outcome of this research. First, Santee was able to contract private consultants for cost benefit/disadvantage analysis of the land use value of where the detention facility is currently residing. The report mainly discussed the detrimental fiscal impact that the proposed expansion would affect the community. The second prevalent mode of activism that demonstrated significant public participation and community feedback took place during the stages of passing
CEQA’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR). All stakeholders of the project took advantage of the circulation of this document as an opportunity to comment on the negative social implications and what they believe would be the predicted consequences of the project. Finally, it is only relevant to highlight the various avenues that the city of Santee navigated in order to gain as well as cultivate a diverse constituency in support of the political stance. These mechanisms included organizing media coverage, an overview website to inform the public about the status of the legal battle, and advocacy groups via social networking sites such as facebook and twitter. Critical analysis of these three forms of community activism revealed that despite the fact that Santee residents have valuable concerns for the preservation of community reputation and safety; This argument for the undesirable location of the jail in Santee assumed
(whether intentional or not) that there are certain spaces that are more appropriate or deserving of housing a jail. Consequently, this argument does fall into the case of NIMBYism because their
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definition of environmental justice is not all encompassing of the ideological project of jails and prisons in general because they are only concerned with getting LCDF relocated outside of
Santee.
DISCURSIVE PRACTICES:
Hire professionals/economic consultants (London report 2007)
In 2007, the city of Santee hired The London Group Realty Advisors, Inc., a realty consultant group, to produce an alternative land development analysis of the land valuation of
Las Colinas Detention Center. The report concluded that the city itself could lose up to $89 million in revenue that could be better invested by selling this acreage. In a personal interview that was conducted with Pamela White, the assistant to Executive Director of Santee, she stated that not only would the city be directly impacted by the proposed project, but County’s adjacent property could also be devalued by over $75 million--and that is almost $165 million in taxpayer money. According to her briefing of meeting minutes, compared to other counties’ proposals for jail bond money, San Diego County’s was one of the highest at a cost of an annual $342,000 per inmate for just 852 new beds (White, 3). This report and the statements made by White contribute to and justify one of the outstanding cases that the city of Santee has made against the proposed expansion project. Based on the figures alone, it appears that the proposed plan to expand the detention facility in Santee could not only damage the reputation of Santee, but it also was presented as misuse of tax expenditure for both the county of San Diego and the city of
Santee.
This is a very interesting fact to highlight because according to an article that was published in the San Diego Union Tribune on Saturday, December 31, 1966, the county grand jury reported the “San Diego County was the “very poor last” in providing rehabilitation
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programs for women prisoners.” Such programs were conducted comparatively in county jails in
Alameda County, Santa Clara County, Los Angeles County, and San Joaquin County. Although none of the Santee residents argued against the need for a larger detention facility, they relied on scientific data and costly research estimate reports to measure how much less profitable it would be to house inmates in a particularly wealthy and thriving city such as Santee. The comments and findings of the private consultants and the residents suggested that inadequate public funds and investment was not the case because since society “needs” prisons, San Diego County taxpayers will pay for it, but not at the expense of profitable real estate and shopping malls.
The claim for misuse of tax dollars hides the larger issue that the city is not addressing that is important element of public spending. All arguments against the county’s misuse of tax dollars suggested that such funds could be better utilized if they were invested in private development. None of the hundreds of letters of correspondence, reports, or spokespersons provided alternative spending recommendations. Despite Santee’s limited understanding of the high market for industry of prisons and jails, the accumulation of hypervisible monetary figures and scientific measurements of the cost benefit analysis of the proposed plan only detracted public urgency for the much needed public investment (as a civic duty) in improving the quality public education, public health and social services, not-for-profit organization across the entire county of San Diego. Santee believes that expanding the jail is not profitable for them based on decrease in property value. It becomes easier then to parallel certain community organizing practices in land use planning issues to the manifestation and perpetuation of the prison industrial complex by analyzing the priorities of the city and private developers involved in to enhance its esteem through the logic and coded language of NIMBYism.
RESPONSES TO THE REVISED ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT :
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>Navigation through Political Maneuver:
As their secondary strategy, residents and private interest groups of Santee wrote hundreds of letters in resistance against the expansion of Las Colinas directed at the
Environmental Impact Report prepared by the county—in defense, arguing that the project was a
CEQA violation of environmental justice. Most of these activists identified as homeowners, parents, teachers, long-time residents, ex-law enforcers, tax payers, ministers, and law-abiding citizens. In analyzing the contents of the correspondence, apart from the misuse of tax dollars argument that was exemplified by the lawsuit against the county and the report prepared by the private consultants, there was a template that was repeated in the majority of the letters made reference to community safety, poor aesthetics and visibility of the jail, misuse of taxpayer dollars, bad public policy, incompatible land use, and insufficient research on alternative sites for
Las Colinas. As adamant opponents of the project, residents have organized formally and informal via social networking websites, town hall meetings, newsletter events, and public protest. However, for the purpose of this research thesis, I found it most relevant to draw attention to the main political strategy that the authors of the letters employed in defense of their position regarding the county’s proposed plan. In an appendix (longer than 600 pages) attached to the Revised Draft Environmental Impact Report prepared by Esther Daigneault, the county environmental planner, the city of Santee wrote:
CEQA FRAMEWORK
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), Public Resources Code section—
21000 et seq., is intended to “[i]nform governmental decision makers and the public about the potential, significant environment effects of proposed activities.” (Guidelines for the Implementation of the California Environmental Quality Act (“State CEQA
Guidelines”), Cal. Code Regs., tit. 14, § 15002, subd. (a)(1).) An EIR achieves this objective by “identifying possible ways to minimize the significant effects, and describing reasonable alternatives to the project” for consideration by the public and the lead agency approving the project. (State CEQA Guidelines, § 15121, subd. (a).)
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Santee is particularly concerned with the inadequate project description and skewed project objectives in the Draft EIR as well as the Project’s significant impacts related to aesthetics, biological resources, hydrology and water quality, land use and planning, noise, public services, utilities and service systems, urban decay, and environmental justice.
(Responses to RDEIR, 26-27)
The city of Santee used CEQA and its EIR as a point of departure to lay out its foundation and claims to environmental justice. Like many of the residents of Santee, an author of a letter expressed his concerns that the proposed expansion still represents a dangerous breech of safety to the children of our community who walk to schools near the jail” (Responses to RDEIR,327)
As environmental justice historians like Melosi (2000) and Koppes have traced environmental justice to the Progressive Era of the 1920s, like many of urban reformers of the time that fought for conservation and improvement of life in the city, I found that most of the opponents of the Las Colinas expansion project stated that criminals do not belong in the geography of Santee but elsewhere that is less economically wealthy. As Melosi (2000) discussed, “Some reformers and city leaders blamed the "great unwashed" in the ethnic and racial ghettoes for causing disease and sanitation problems” (Melosi, 55). In their resistance to the jail expansion in their community, Santee activists have stretched the definition of environmental justice by stating that housing a jail of criminals is unjust for social and cultural environment of Santee. Under the assumption that all children should have the access to safe streets and neighborhoods, the residents undermined the same possible effects of jails in the other alternative sites (the word “community” is carefully avoided) that their experts have recommended for the projects. Under vague terms such as environment, the city and residents of
Santee have constructed themselves as victims of the County.
>Unintended consequences:
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The city of Santee has socially and discursively spacialized and racialized “criminality” and free territories by claiming itself as a place that is undeserving of housing the women’s jail.
When the city and its residents make demands for the jail be built somewhere outside of Santee because they are one of the most economically thriving cities in the county, family-oriented community, their schools yield the best test scores, they have a relatively low-crime, etc., they are defining themselves against an imagination of the antithetical, poor, crime-ridden cities that are more appropriate for facilitating the jail. Not once in the official documents or correspondence letters did they consider the external factors that have contributed to crime, poverty, and lack of access to better schools. The Santee residents want “criminals” to be locked up, they just do not want to have to see or live with them.
Environmental justice, in their case, meant being as far removed from the visibility of crime. Ironically, it is the presence of prisons and jails and the reputation that is attached to communities and bodies of the incarcerated subjects that “free tax-paying” citizens can feel
“safe” and “family-oriented.” Local Santee residents, like any other nonprisoner, sees itself as deserving of rights and representation simply because they are not in the confinement of actual jail. One of the many comments that were directed towards the county aggrieved:
“ I don’t understand why they should get these kinds of privileges and accommodations made for them and their families when they are there because they broke the law. They couldn’t follow the rules and yet our community is being punished. I believe that sets a wrong example for our children… If this were Del Mar, La Jolla, Encinitas, Poway, or even La Mesa this wouldn’t be happening. Would you want this to happen in your community?” (Comments to RDEIR, 331 K1-4)
Santee’s self-identification as a community in order to frame itself in this controversy as victim and the county as the bully has resulted in contradictions in which the county has diminished Santee’s credibility within its protest what it refers to environmental justice. For in instance, in an article that released last June of 2009, Mayor Voepel of Santee “This rips out the
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heart of our city,” while referring to his vision of Santee as the “La Jolla of East County. Look around at Santee. The development is family oriented. A prison does not fit here. It does not make sense.” In contrast to traditional environmental injustice cases, certain people, specifically the inmates themselves, are viewed as a negative environmental impact perceived as a consequence from the expansion project. Such anxiety towards inmates (who happened to be disproportionately African Americans and Latinos) is fear from racism disguised as environmental justice.
While communities and thousands of impoverished people are underseized on account of petty crime and not enough public funds are invested in empowering and rebuilding these disenfranchised communities, millions of dollars are funneled to house/rehabilitate people (today mostly African American/Latino men and women). There is no evidence that jails and prisons empower people. There is a disproportionate rate of inmates that are poor and are people of color. This issue is not being addressed. Instead, the majority of the letters that residents are writing have constructed that comes from the product of incarceration. If more poor and people of color are going to be incarcerated, instead of constructing racist and cultural generalizations that further disable social mobility for politically underrepresented people, cities like Santee might need to reconsider accustoming themselves to having jails and prisons in their neighborhoods. Santee officials and residents have been quick to oppose the expansion of Las
Colinas in Santee, and even quicker to point out that it ought to be moved to Otay Mesa where detention facilities are already located. Affective words such as “family-oriented, poor aesthetic value, negative economic impact, and safety” distinguish Santee as a community from those places “over there.”The discourse has been coded or justified as “incompatible, inefficient, costly, and crime.” Everyone is fighting for a good quality of life, as no person wants to live in
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constant danger while in their own land. Clean air, clean water, clean and sustainable energy access, these are all causes that people champion as their everyday rights.
GETTING THE WORD OUT:
Santee has extravagantly organized in diverse ways in order to publicize its political position against the expansion project. Since July 2009 the city has filed a law suit against the county for violating CEQA guidelines; lobbied the county planning administration; participated in planning meetings; received coverage on the radio, television, local and county newspapers, and even commentary and support by the local San Diego Architectural Foundation; organized a special interest group on facebook to build a larger support network; and created a site for bloggers on Twitter to voice their opinion about the Las Colinas plan.
Through these different technologies of communication and protest it became clear that the Santee’s goal is narrow—take Las Colinas out. Many pictures of children playing and seniors walking clean streets were heavily posted on the websites and blogs. Maps were circulated to portray the monstrosity of the newly proposed plan and its inconvenient geographic location in
Santee. There were several hundred posts altogether that expressed enraged sentiments and opinions against the expansion. Important officials such as Council woman Dianne Jacobs,
Santee Mayor Randy Voepel, and several San Diego sheriffs and ex- law enforcers made several appearances on television and in meetings to assure the residents of Santee that they will reverse the plan. What had all this commotion accounted to?
Granted that all this money has been invested to increase awareness and political representation, for the purpose of this thesis, the Santee resistance to the expansion project lent itself to be a case of NIMBYism; the only exception it that they used methods of protest from grassroots environmental justice movements in order to accomplish their goals. The only way of
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fully succeed in “getting Las Colinas out” of Santee will require farther reaching alliances with state agencies that want Las Colinas to be moved out of Santee. Even if Las Colinas was relocated to the alternative sites that were suggested in the EIR and London report, what really has been accomplished? Are communities in fact safer because jails and prisons are being expanded or built?
COUNTY
Claims to Environmental Justice Denied
The county referred to the Presidential Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to
Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations (February
1994) to refute Santee’s outcry of environmental injustice. Although the city of Santee has appropriated grassroots strategies to obtain environmental justice, their reflexive reputation the
“La Jolla of the East County” disqualifies it from the civic privilege and authority to make the demands that it is pressuring the county to adhere to. Meanwhile, the county has specified that the Environmental Impact Report’s purpose is to analyze only potential physical impacts that the proposed project may cause. While the city is stretching its claim to environmental justice, it became evident that the county had restricted its own understanding of the “environment” only to physical impacts.
The county’s treatment of Santee’s plead for repatriation has opened a question that would be interesting to explore in another research within the context of post-Reagan administration’s enveloping of the prison industrial complex. Would Santee have been experienced more favorable feedback, reaction, and political participation if it was a poor ethnically underrepresented community that did not wish to have house a prison in its very own backyard? I address this issue in the Findings/Analysis segment because has mentioned in the literature view around prison studies and environmental justice movement, crime and toxic waste has affected poor communities of color at a disproportionate rate where such communities were not as equipped/trained extensively like Santee to hire private consultants, hire the press, sue the county, receive several revisions for the EIR. If one is to consider factors such as legal literacy, access to lawyers, English as a second or third language, and structural racism and its procedures that make it nearly impossible for poor communities to publicly engage in the political process, my research on Santee’s battle against the county has been a good case of how many unnamed communities are left outside of the decision making process of planning or banal words like environmental justice can be repeated enough where we forget that “justice” is supposed to be the framework in reach we planners aim to uphold ourselves to.
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Evidence was provided
In response to the city’s concerns around public safety and negative fiscal impact inflicted by the proposed plan in the EIR, the County had responded repeatedly that such claims are unjustifiable and irrelevant for the purpose of the EIR. For every letter that was sent to against the expansion, the county attached:
Regarding potential public safety impacts, issues raised related to public safety are social issues, and are not issues that relate to physical environmental effects (see CEQA
Guidelines Section 15064(e)). See response to comment E-42 and RDEIR Section
3.1.4.2. The purpose of an EIR is to analyze the potential physical impacts that the proposed project may cause, not to analyze the potential fiscal implications of the project.
(Responses to RDEIR 254, H-2)
In addition to dismissing the city’s appeals to public safety and negative economic effect on the community, the county has ultimately dismissed the public by arguing that the city has presented no evidence of the jail’s physical detriment on the surrounding communities. By distinguishing the different dimensions of the term “environmental effect,” the county blocks any further form of dialogue between the city and the county—leaving the county with the final and unchecked juridical power to make decisions that affect everyone. It is important ask ourselves the types of evidence that would be needed to convince entities such as the board of supervisors or the city of
Santee to convince them that building or expanding prisons and jails will not empower those without access to economic, nor can our economy maintain/supply the needs of the prison industry.
Business As Usual
Finally, in this last subsection of Findings/Analysis, it became clear that the party line between the city and the county blurred when it came down to their main argument for or against the expansion of Las Colinas: fiscal impacts. Even though the county has dismissed the city’s reports by claiming that “the purpose of the EIR is to analyze the potential physical impacts that the proposed project may cause, not to analyze the potential fiscal impacts that the proposed project may cause, not to analyze the potential fiscal implications of the project.” As a quick demonstration here are a few highlights that was prepared for the environmental impact report:
Fiscal Impacts:
Funds for this request are available in Capital Project 1000159 –Women’s Detention
Facility. If approved, this request will result in $750,000 in costs for planning,
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architectural services, cost estimating, and project management/ construction management services through preparation of design-build request for proposal documents. The funding source is an operating transfer from the General Fund based on fund balance that was previously designated for Sheriff’s Department Capital Projects.
There will be no additional staff years required.
Business Impact Report:
The Women’s Detention Facility project will result in approximately 2,900 jobs for private sector contractors and suppliers.
(County of San Diego Agenda Item, 2010)
As I critiqued in Santee’s strategies against the county, relying solely on a fiscal cost/benefit framework when we a discussing the planning politics around institutions that punish people holds to be extremely problematic. In an interview that I conducted with the environmental planner that prepared the EIR, she made it quite clear that unless the city could challenge the county’s negligence to their concerns, the county has complete jurisdiction over the expansion project within Santee. This attitude sheds light on the way that power and production of knowledge are negotiated within the politics of urban planning.
Even though prison development within the last three decades has heralded itself to keep communities safe, it is important to understand the cost of such an institution that depends on the incarceration of over two million black and brown men and women in order to legitimate funding for police force tasks and prison staff. While the incarceration of women has increased exponentially, the county and the city are fighting over the cost of a prison and are fighting over the “best” location for such an anomaly. I will echo much of the recent scholars committed to prison studies, “How can we plan prisons without any dialogue about prisoners without a binary
“us-them” relationship when we are supposed to share the same land and natural resources?”
Conclusion :
While residents of Santee unite to overturn the proposed expansion, what has become more evident in this research is their (as well as many other Americans’) apathy towards the
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incarceration of racially and sexually oppressed women. The only people that are represented in the public debate are nonprisoners because it is assumed that prisoners do not deserve representation or influence in the planning process of the holding sites themselves. Second, the ideological purpose of prisons are not discussed nor challenged during this controversy. Through the lens of the media, it appears that the Santee residents are exhibiting NIMBY attitudes which fear the racial or cultural contamination of the prisons in their sweet havens. No one wants to live with the threat that convicts might escape into their neighborhoods. No one wants to raise children in the vicinity of razor-wire fences and guard towers. Ultimately, the prison industries continue to thrive from the corporal, cultural, and commoditive incarceration of inmates, mainly women of color. The three-time expansion of prisons requires that more inmates will fill it up.
“These “types” of people can’t help but engage in illegal activities” are culturally constructed in mainstream America thought. Images of culturally inferior people addicted to crime are reproduced and frozen in the public imagination.
It is crucial for planners to pay attention to media and literary responses in order to deconstruct attitudes and policy that reproduce inequalities amongst people based on perceived difference across race, gender, class, and sexuality. Instead planners can play an important role in destabilizing the discursive violence caused by categories socially constructed to advance the hegemonic agenda of heteronormative capitalistic patriarchy. With this said, social justice and compassion cannot be stripped from the planning process.
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References

Baron, Leonard, London, Gary, and Moeder, Nathan. “Las Colinas Detention Valuation and Alternative Land Development Analysis Prepared for the City of Santee.” The
London Group Realty Advisors, Inc, July 2007.

Boudreau, Kristin. The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American
Capital Cases. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2006.

Chang, Tracy F. H. and Thompkins, Douglas E.
Corporations Go to Prisons: The
Expansion of Corporate Power in the Correctional Industry. Labor Studies Journal,
Volume 27, Number 1. pp. 45-69. Spring 2002.
 Clock, Michele. “County approves $300 million women's prison.” San Diego Union
Tribune- Sign On Diego. Jan 2009. http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jun/24/san-diego-8212-calling-las-colinas/

Daigneault, Esther. City of Santee Emergency Impact Report Letter. City of Santee,
January 2009.

Daigneault, Esther. Response to Comment on the Draft Environmental Impact Report.
County of San Diego Department of Public Works. June 2009

Donahue, John D. The Privatization Decision. New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1989.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in
Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2007.

Ford, Lucy H. Challenging Global Environmental Governance: Social Movement
Agency and Global Civil Society. Global Environmental Politics 3.2 (2003) 120-134

Hames-Garcia, Michael. Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of
Justice. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Haslam, Jason. The State of Prison. American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 2. pp.
467-479 June 2008.

Huling, Tracy. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, Editors. “Building A Prisons
Economy in Rural America. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Imprisonment. The New Press. 2002.

Irving, Toni. Decoding Black Women: Policing Practices and Rape Prosecution on the
Streets of Philadephia. NWSA Journal, Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 2008.

James, Joy.
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal
Democracy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.

Kauffman, Kelsey The Brotherhood: Racism and Intimidation Among Prison Staff at the
Indiana Correctional Facility-Putnamville, Russell Compton Center for Peace and Justice,
DePauw University, April 2000.

Koppes, Clayton. "Efficiency, Equity, Esthetics: Shifting Themes in American
Conservation," in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. by Donald Worster. Cambridge University Press, 1988, 233-34.

Kulish, Nicholas. Crime Pays: Since Census Counts Convicts, Some Towns Can't Get
Enough ---Federal and State Funds Tied To Total Population Help Florence, Ariz.,
Rebuild ---Annexing the Penitentiary. Wall Street Journal, New August 9, 2001.

Lawston, Jodie Michelle.Women, the Criminal Justice System, and Incarceration:
Processes of Power, Silence, and Resistance. NWSA Journal, Volume 20, Number 2. pp.
1-18. Summer 2008.
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 McGurty, Eileen Maura. “"From Nimby to Civil Rights: The Origins of the
Environmental Justice Movement," Environmental History 2, July 1997

Melosi, V. Martin. Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of
History. Journal of Policy History. The Pennsylvania State University, 2000.

Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America. New York, NY: Verso. 1999

Pellow, David N. Environmental Inequality Formation: Towards a Theory of
Environmental Injustice. American Behavioral Scientist 43(4) 2000: 581-601.

Reynolds, Marylee. The War on Drugs, Prison Building, and Globalization: Catalysts for the Global Incarceration of Women. NWSA Journal, Volume 20, Number 2, Summer
2008.
 Rodríguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison
Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
 Scalia, John. “Federal Drug Offenders, 1999 with Trends 1984-1999.” Washington, D.C.:
Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2001.

Schneider, Anne Larason. “Public-Private Partnership in the U.S. Prison System.” Public-
Private Policy Partnerships. P. V. Rosenau, ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2000.
 Smith, Davis A.“Prison Industry Programs: Effects on Inmates, Law-Abiding Workers, and Business.” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversights and Investigations of the
Committee on Education and the Workforce, House of Representatives. 1998.
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Additional information from the County:
There is no direct relationship between the existing facility and any physical environmental effects on surrounding uses. Therefore, the issues raised in this comment related to public safety are social issues, and are not issues that relate to physical environmental effects (See CEQA Guidelines Section 15046(e)). Nonetheless, the following information is provided in response to this comment. As indicated in the REDEIR (Sections
1.2.1.4, 3.1.4, and 3.1.7), SDSD will provide for all security needs associated with the project.
The proposed security plan incorporates a combination of architectural and operational features, including the provision of SDSD staff monitor and manage the activities of inmates and patrol the campus perimeter. Other security measures include fencing, security electronics
(e.g., alarms Closed-Circuit television (CCTV) monitoring, door controls), and site lighting.
The facility perimeter will be secured using a system of double fences and a patrol ring road.
(138 E-42)
Urban Planning’s responsibilities towards Environmental (in)justice
1-103. Development of Agency Strategies. (a) Except as provided in section 6-605 of this order, each Federal agency shall develop an agency-wide environmental justice strategy, as set forth in subsections (b) - (e) of this section that identifies and addresses disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations. The environmental justice strategy shall list programs, policies, planning and public participation processes, enforcement, and/or rulemakings related to human health or the environment that should be revised to, at a minimum: (1) promote enforcement of all health and environmental statutes in areas with minority populations and lowincome populations: (2) ensure greater public participation; (3) improve research and data collection relating to the health of and environment of minority populations and low-income populations; and (4) identify differential patterns of consumption of natural resources among minority populations and low-income populations. In addition, the environmental justice strategy shall include, where appropriate, a timetable for undertaking identified revisions and consideration of economic and social implications of the revisions. a.
Low-Income means a household income at or below the Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines; b.
Minority means a person who is:
(1) Black (having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa);
(2) Hispanic (of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South
American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race);
(3) Asian American (having origins in any of the original peoples of the
Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands); or
(4) American Indian and Alaskan Native (having origins in any of the original people of North America and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition).
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c.
Low-Income Population means any readily identifiable group of low-income persons who live in geographic proximity, and, if circumstances warrant, geographically dispersed/transient persons (such as migrant workers or Native
Americans) who would be similarly affected by a proposed FHWA program, policy, or activity. d.
Minority Population means any readily identifiable groups of minority persons who live in geographic proximity, and if circumstances warrant, geographically dispersed/transient persons (such as migrant workers or Native Americans) who will be similarly affected by a proposed FHWA program, policy, or activity. e.
Adverse Effects means the totality of significant individual or cumulative human health or environmental effects, including interrelated social and economic effects, which may include, but are not limited to: bodily impairment, infirmity, illness or death; air, noise, and water pollution and soil contamination; destruction or disruption of man-made or natural resources; destruction or diminution of aesthetic values; destruction or disruption of community cohesion or a community's economic vitality; destruction or disruption of the availability of public and private facilities and services; vibration; adverse employment effects; displacement of persons, businesses, farms, or nonprofit organizations; increased traffic congestion, isolation, exclusion or separation of minority or low-income individuals within a given community or from the broader community; and the denial of, reduction in, or significant delay in the receipt of, benefits of FHWA programs, policies, or activities. f.
Disproportionately High and Adverse Effect on Minority and Low-Income
Populations means an adverse effect that:
(1) is predominately borne by a minority population and/or a low-income population; or
(2) will be suffered by the minority population and/or low-income population and is appreciably more severe or greater in magnitude than the adverse effect that will be suffered by the nonminority population and/or nonlow- income population. g.
Programs, Policies, and/or Activities means all projects, programs, policies, and activities that affect human health or the environment, and that are undertaken, funded, or approved by FHWA. These include, but are not limited to, permits, licenses, and financial assistance provided by FHWA. Interrelated projects within a system may be considered to be a single project, program, policy, or activity for purposes of this Order.
CEQA15064 (e): Determining the Significance of the Environmental Effects Caused by a
Project
Economic and social changes resulting from a project shall not be treated as significant effects on the environment.
Highly specialization and professionalism found in analysis of Planning Documents:
(b) The determination of whether a project may have a significant effect on the environment calls for careful judgment on the part of the public agency involved, based to the extent possible on scientific and factual data.
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