As news of successful budget negotiations continues to flicker into being, I’ll use one criterion to judge whether Democrats have tried their best and achieved a reasonable amount: are non-violent prisoners being released?

Schwarzenegger wants to cut the private education system that his children, unlike mine, will never need to know.  There is a clear tradeoff between educating students and keeping marijuana smokers and the like in jail.  If this is serious, if this is a true crisis calling for the most extraordinary measures, then I want to know: are the prisoners being released?

If the schools are being cut drastically and the prisoners are not being released, then this is not a true crisis because it didn’t call for extraordinary measures.  It did not move Schwarzenegger, and conservatives in the state, out of their comfort zones.  So I look for that marker: how has the prison system fared compared to the educational system?  Have the prisoners been released?  If not, in what sense was this a true crisis?