Brown’s plan basically holds, with hope held out for greater reform
by Brian Leubitz
With time running out on funding and planning prison transfers, Sen. Steinberg has compromised to something appearing very similar to Gov. Brown’s original plan:
A modified version of Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison housing plan appears headed for approval after Brown and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, the plan’s chief critic, announced today they reached a compromise.
The state will proceed with Brown’s plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce California’s prison population by moving thousands of inmates to local lockups and out of state, but only if federal judges overseeing California’s prison overcrowding case do not give the state more time to address overcrowding.(Sac Bee)
That “but only if” is the compromise that Steinberg was able to get from the Governor. It also represents the great hope of his own plan that perhaps the court would grant the state additional time to deal with the overcrowding and get back to 137.5% of capacity. That delay is still quite speculative at this time. If it is ultimately denied, this plan looks pretty close to what Gov. Brown offered up originally. If there is a delay, perhaps we can really work on some of those needed reforms.
The “deal” is a token one, and has zero chance of being relied upon by the Court to issue a stay of its Order. Given that the Court has provided lawmakers (and the Governor) every opportunity to fix the problem — and to date the Governor continues to make arbitrary parole reversals which aren’t supported by the record of evidence, further exacerbating the overcrowding crisis — California’s credibility is shot. Beyond that, if the Governor were serious then he’d call a Special Session, which he hasn’t because he knows lawmakers won’t pass anything. Since everyone in the Capitol knows nothing legislatively will be done, that makes Senator Steinberg’s ‘proposal’ meaningless, and of course we know the default ‘solution’ if Steinberg’s plan fails, is the Governor’s original plan. The Court will see with through this Trojan Horse.