The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has repeatedly fallen short of its own savings goals, yet the state has continued to raise the department’s budget. That approach leaves taxpayers paying for unused capacity instead of forcing a serious review of where prison spending can be reduced.

The issue is especially relevant in the Inland Empire, where state prisons and related facilities have long been part of the regional landscape, including in communities such as Norco. Decisions made in Sacramento about correctional funding directly affect local institutions, workers, families and taxpayers.

Maintaining excess prison beds is not the same as improving public safety. If the state has fewer people in custody than its prison system was built to hold, leaders should be asking why costs remain so high and whether resources could be better directed elsewhere.

California’s prison budget should reflect actual need, not outdated assumptions. Continuing to increase spending while savings targets are missed undermines public confidence and makes it harder to fund other priorities across the state.

A safer California requires accountability, fiscal discipline and a correctional system sized to today’s realities. Paying for beds that are not needed does not accomplish that.

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Director William K. Marshall III told the agency’s nearly 35,000 employees that the union, the Council of Prison Locals, had become “an obstacle to progress instead of a partner in it.” The contract, he said, “too often slowed or prevented” changes meant to improve safety and morale.

“The whole purpose of ending this contract is to make your lives better,” Marshall wrote in a message posted to the agency’s website. He said the agency will “move forward with solutions that work, without roadblocks, without excuses, and with one goal: to make the Bureau a place where people are proud to serve.”

The union’s president, Brandy Moore-White, said ending the collective bargaining agreement, which was supposed to run through May 2029, will jeopardize the safety and livelihoods of workers who endure dangerous conditions to keep inmates, staff and communities safe.

“We will absolutely fight this tooth and nail!” she said.

The Bureau of Prisons operates 122 facilities and has about 155,000 inmates. It has an annual budget of more than $8.5 billion. The Justice Department’s largest employer, it has been plagued for years by severe understaffing that has led to long overtime shifts and the use of prison nurses, teachers, cooks and other workers to guard inmates.

The agency has a $3 billion repair backlog, thousands of positions are vacant and an official told Congress in February that more than 4,000 beds are unusable because of dangerous conditions like leaking or failing roofs, mold, asbestos or lead.

In a letter Thursday informing Moore-White of the move, Marshall cited a executive order that President Donald Trump signed in March that exempts federal intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative and national security agencies from collective bargaining or recognizing employee labor unions.

A few weeks before Trump signed the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security said it was ending its collective bargaining agreement with Transportation Security Administration employees who screen passengers and baggage at airports and other travel hubs. The union sued and a judge issued a preliminary injunction in June that has kept the contract in place.

Marshall told Moore-White that union dues will no longer be collected and that employees no longer have a right to union representation during meetings with management, investigative interviews or other proceedings.

In his message Thursday to Bureau of Prisons employees, Marshall said that even without a union or collective bargaining pact, they will continue to enjoy robust protections under federal civil service law, including job security and whistleblower rights.

Workers will not be removed, suspended or demoted without cause and due process, he wrote. Pay and benefits, including salary, retirement, health insurance, overtime, leave accrual and uniform allowance are guaranteed by law and will remain unchanged.

“Those safeguards aren’t going anywhere,” Marshall said. “This isn’t about taking things away, it’s about giving you more. More clarity. More fairness. More respect.”

The Bureau of Prisons has been in a state of flux since Trump returned to office in January.

Its mission has been expanded under the Republican’s administration to include taking in thousands of immigration detainees at some of its prisons and jails under an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security.

In May, Trump directed the Bureau of Prisons to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz — the notorious penitentiary on an island in San Francisco Bay that last held inmates more than 60 years ago. Four months later, it remains a tourist attraction.

The Bureau of Prisons last year closed several facilities, in part to cut costs, but it is also in the process of building a new prison in Kentucky. In May, Marshall said the agency was halting some hiring.

An ongoing Associated Press investigation has uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons, including rampant sexual abuse, widespread criminal activity by employees, dozens of escapes and the free flow of guns, drugs and other contraband.

Working face to face with killers, sexual predators and other violent criminals, federal prison employees are routinely threatened and harassed, and some have been slashed, stabbed or even killed.

Last year, a mailroom supervisor at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atwater, California, died after opening a letter that prosecutors said was laced with fentanyl and other substances. At the federal prison in Thomson, Illinois, a union official said, female staff members were subject to more than 1,600 instances of sexual harassment and abuse by inmates in a four-year span.

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In a post on his Truth Social site Sunday evening, Trump wrote that, “For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“That is why, today,” he said, “I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”

Trump’s directive to rebuild and reopen the long-shuttered penitentiary was the latest salvo in his effort to overhaul how and where federal prisoners and immigration detainees are locked up. But such a move would likely be an expensive and challenging proposition. The prison was closed in 1963 due to crumbling infrastructure and the high costs of repairing and supplying the island facility, because everything from fuel to food had to be brought by boat.

Bringing the facility up to modern-day standards would require massive investments at a time when the Bureau of Prisons has been shuttering prisons for similar infrastructure issues.

The prison — infamously inescapable due to the strong ocean currents and cold Pacific waters that surround it — was known as the “The Rock” and housed some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, including gangster Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

It has long been part of the cultural imagination and has been the subject of numerous movies, including “The Rock” starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

Still in the 29 years it was open, 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes, according to the FBI. Nearly all were caught or didn’t survive the attempt.

The fate of three particular inmates — John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris — is of some debate and was dramatized in the 1979 film “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood.

Alcatraz Island is now a major tourist site that is operate by the National Park Service and is a designated National Historic Landmark.

Trump, returning to the White House on Sunday night after a weekend in Florida, said he’d come up with the idea because of frustrations with “radicalized judges” who have insisted those being deported receive due process. Alcatraz, he said, has long been a “symbol of law and order. You know, it’s got quite a history.”

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that the agency “will comply with all Presidential Orders.” The spokesperson did not immediately answer questions from The Associated Press regarding the practicality and feasibility of reopening Alcatraz or the agency’s role in the future of the former prison given the National Park Service’s control of the island.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat whose district includes the island, questioned the feasibility of reopening the prison after so many years. “It is now a very popular national park and major tourist attraction. The President’s proposal is not a serious one,” she wrote on X.

The island serves as a veritable time machine to a bygone era of corrections. The Bureau of Prisons currently has 16 penitentiaries performing the same high-security functions as Alcatraz, including its maximum security facility in Florence, Colorado, and the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, which is home to the federal death chamber.

The order comes as Trump has been clashing with the courts as he tries to send accused gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, without due process. Trump has also floated the legally dubious idea of sending some federal U.S. prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

Trump has also directed the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 of what he has labeled the “worst criminal aliens.”

The Bureau of Prisons has faced myriad crises in recent years and has been subjected to increased scrutiny after Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide at a federal jail in New York City in 2019. An AP investigation uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons. AP reporting has disclosed widespread criminal activity by employees, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies, including assaults and suicides.

The AP’s investigation also exposed rampant sexual abuse at a federal women’s prison in Dublin, California. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law strengthening oversight of the agency after AP reporting spotlighted its many flaws.

At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons is operating in a state of flux — with a recently installed new director and a redefined mission that includes taking in thousands of immigration detainees at some of its prisons and jails under an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. The agency last year closed several facilities, in part to cut costs, but is also in the process of building a new prison in Kentucky.

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