After the election of President Barack Obama, a wave of white racial resentment galvanized by the Tea Party movement swept business-backed fiscal conservatives into state houses across the country. As promised, governors and state legislatures began to defund a variety of state agencies and programs. Where politicians had once protected already underresourced departments of corrections from spending cuts, they now began to delay maintenance on prison facilities and strip state prisons of educational programs down to what one Florida state legislator called “bare and naked incarceration.”
As a result, state prisons today are severely underfunded, understaffed, overcrowded and deteriorating.