Nobody likes the road that the budget appears to be going down, but one side benefit, perhaps the only one, is that we might yet have a conversation about the unjust and costly prison crisis that has deeply impacted the current situation. Here’s Asm. Jim Beall (D-Campbell) yesterday:
We’ve got to reduce spending on our highest cost-drivers, prisons and health care. The prison budget has doubled in the past decade to $10 billion. The state has 173,000 inmates… Yet, California has a 70 percent recidivism rate. We aren’t producing the results for the money we spend… For over half of the prisoners, drugs or alcohol played some role in their crimes. A 2006 UCLA study said 42 percent of our inmates needed alcohol treatment and 56 percent needed drug treatment. It’s clear: The state should emphasize alcohol and drug treatment programs and prevention education.
Absolutely. Now, the way that the Governor is going about this, by just trying to dump undocumented immigrants in prison on the ICE and mass release without restructuring and treatment and rehab, is of course dicey. He will be helped by the Administration’s effort to identify every undocumented immigrant and ready them for deportation, but that’s a years-long process.
However, there are signals that the powerful prison guard’s union knows exactly what could be coming – and they’re trying to get out in front of it by voluntarily offering well over $6 billion in cuts. Most of it goes to capping prison health care, which has already been found to be Constitutionally inadequate, and halting prison expansion through AB900, which I think is spent through bond issues and not the General Fund. But there are other interesting recommendations in there:
2. Save up to $500 million by trimming CDCR administrative staff, which has ballooned by 400 new positions in recent months and more than doubled two of the department’s administrative divisions […]
7. Save potentially hundreds of millions of dollars ($20,000 per parolee) by embracing our past recommendation to expand Drug Court, Mental Health Court, Reentry Court and Revocation Court.
9. Save millions by no longer providing CDCR managers and headquarters staff with state vehicles and mileage allowances for commuting to work.
10. Conduct annual performance audits to determine which parole and rehabilitation programs are achieving their goals.
Remember, these are the prison guard’s union’s recommendations. They have an interest in keeping jails packed and ensuring overtime for their employees to manage the overcrowding. And even they understand both the need for cost-cutting and the need to expand the role of drug treatment and mental health rather than defaulting to incarceration. They’re behind the curve and still modest in their goals, but significantly, the ball is moving in the direction of reducing prison costs for the first time in a long while. Obviously, jumping from this to reforming sentencing and keeping nonviolent offenders out of prison and into treatment won’t be easy, and the residual “tough on crime” stance still predominates among the political class. But finally, we’re having the conversation as a crisis forces the issue. Democrats ought to take this and run with it, and demand the kind of sane prison policies here that we see in Kansas and Texas.
…incidentally, buried within the Legislative Analyst’s cost-cutting proposals was one recommending “altering California’s three-strikes law.” We’re starting to get serious.
I’m glad my assemblymember is taking the lead on this issue. He’s someone who should be listened to more often. The alcohol tax he proposed would have brought in a lot of revenue.
They have one objective: keep their members fully employed and handsomely paid. Everything else is up for grabs. So they want prisons filled to capacity every day. They will portait each and every inmate as Charlie Manson and play on public fears to meet their only objective.
I suppose that all unions, to some extent, fudge the truth a little to enhance the image of their members. But CCPOA fear-mongering makes Dick Cheney seem like the camp song leader for Kumbaya.
Thanks David for these comments. Earlier posts equating a discussion of needed cuts with capitulation offered both bad politics and bad policy.
As a policy matter, there are indeed areas where we can improve the state by making cuts – prisons in particular. In addition to the release of non-violent offenders, the prison system needs to engage in more meaningful triage, placing non violent and more trustworthy offenders in lower security prisons (reducing prison guard staffing in the process) and enhancing work programs. Imagine the savings at the local level if we simply decriminalized marijuana (gaining income by taxing it as well) and creating local work-program alternatives to jail for non-violent and misdemeanor offenders.
Likewise, rather than stick our heads in the sand about cuts, if they are to be made we need to be assertive about limiting cuts to where they will do the least harm – administrators rather than teachers, for example.
As for the politics of this discussion, progressives and Democrats in general get hammered as “tax and spend” liberals who, by implication, could care less about fiscal discipline. The best way we can earn the trust of the taxpayers – whose taxes we clearly need – is to assure them that we spend their money wisely and efficiently.
It is amazing that the yacht party – with its Halliburtons, its crony capitalism, its mismanagement of everything, continues to put us on defense with their anti-government mismanagement arguments. Part of the problem, unfortunately, is that we fall into their framing trap too easily, often challenging their argument that there is waste in government.
Rather that bite on that frame, we need to redirect the debate by agreeing that any level of waste is unacceptable and then move on to demonstrate that we are the ones with the ideas, the commitment, and the competence to make things work better. In doing so, we can establish the fiscal credibility that we will need when we ask the the public to support expenditures and taxes.
Some years back, I did a short stint as a magazine editor for a publication targeted to the law-enforcement community. One of my jobs was a monthly interview with a law-enforcement professional–chief of police, county sheriff, public prosecutor, and the like.
Their view of law enforcement truly surprised me, but was entirely consistent with the UCLA study you cite. One guy said that politicians have found that “lock ’em up” lines win votes, so they continue to espouse that frame. But professionals who work in the system know it’s not true. The county sheriff said it best. He said they know a small percentage of the people they incarcerate are just “bad” and he didn’t know why. But he claimed the rest were undereducated, out of work, had a substance problem, or other family problem. He continued, saying most elementary-school teachers could identify families in trouble. And that it would save the taxpayer money to address the problems from a social-welfare perspective–before a family member wound up in jail. Plus it would enhance the productivity of the prospective inmate, and save grief for their family, the victim, and their family.
Clearly the legislative analyst knows this too.
However, we have already tried to modify the 3 strikes law that is overcrowding our prisons with non-violent young offenders because it is too broadly applied and covers non-violent offenses as well as the violent ones it was intended to “protect” us from. That proposition failed fairly recently. So how do we fix this?