At the Netroots Nation panel (and a quick thanks to everyone who attended, and the panelists, and Dan Walters for noticing), I identified two short-term fights that are worth engaging.  One consists of playing defense – stopping the Parsky Commission from instituting a Latvia-ization of California through eliminating business taxes and flattening the income tax.  The other short-term fight concerns the $1.2 billion dollars in cuts to the prison budget, identified in the July budget agreement but not clarified on the specifics until the Legislature returns to work this week.  We are starting to see some organizing around that, with human rights and civil liberties leaders massing on the Capitol Steps today to promote sound prison reform instead of just lopping off all rehabilitation and treatment programs for the overcrowded corrections system and calling it a day.  Leland Yee, Nancy Skinner, Jim Beall and Tom Ammiano, who just replaced indie Juan Arambula as chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, will speak.  So we have a sympathetic ear on one of the key committees.

About a week back, Laura Sullivan produced an NPR report describing the devolution of the corrections system in California, using Johnny Cash’s historic concert at Folsom Prison as a launching pad:

The morning that Cash played may have been the high-water mark for Folsom – and for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The men in the cafeteria lived alone in their own prison cells. Almost every one of them was in school or learning a professional trade. The cost of housing them barely registered on the state budget. And when these men walked out of Folsom free, the majority of them never returned to prison.

It was a record no other state could match.

Things have changed. California’s prisons are all in a state of crisis. And nowhere is this more visible than at Folsom today.

Folsom was built to hold 1,800 inmates. It now houses 4,427.

It’s once-vaunted education and work programs have been cut to just a few classes, with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long.

Officers are on furlough. Its medical facility is under federal receivership. And like every other prison in the state, 75 percent of the inmates who are released from Folsom today will be back behind bars within three years.

In addition to having a solid education, transportation and medical system in the early post-war period, California’s prisons were once the envy of the nation, too.  Then the Tough On Crime crowd got a hold of the levers of power, produced 1,000 laws expanding sentences over 30 years, pushed the public to do the same through ballot initiatives, increased parole sanctions, and the system just got swamped.  In the early 1980s we had 20,000 prisoners.  Now it’s 170,000.  The overcrowding decimates rehabilitation, sends nonviolent offenders into what amounts to a college for violent crime, violates prisoner rights by denying proper medical care, and increases costs at every point along the way.  Sullivan argues that much of this goes back to the prison guard’s union.

In three decades, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has become one of the most powerful political forces in California. The union has contributed millions of dollars to support “three strikes” and other laws that lengthen sentences and increase parole sanctions. It donated $1 million to Wilson after he backed the three strikes law.

And the result for the union has been dramatic. Since the laws went into effect and the inmate population boomed, the union grew from 2,600 officers to 45,000 officers. Salaries jumped: In 1980, the average officer earned $15,000 a year; today, one in every 10 officers makes more than $100,000 a year.

Sullivan uncovered a front group PAC called Crime Victims United of California that has received every one of their donations from the CCPOA.  By seeding “victim’s rights” groups and enabling more stringent sentencing laws, the CCPOA mainly benefits from the overtime needed for their officers to properly house 170,000 prisoners in cells designed for 100,000.  70% of the prison budget pays salaries.  5% goes to education and vocational programs.  And that’s the part of the budget being cut.

It only costs her about $100,000 to run these programs – not even a blip in a $10 billion-a-year prison budget. But, says Bracy, the programs are always the first to go. Sometimes she almost feels like giving up.

“It’s just not cost-effective to throw men and women in prison and then do nothing with them,” she said. “And shame on us for thinking that’s safety. It’s not public safety. You lock them up and do nothing with them. They go out not even equal to what they came in but worse.”

The numbers bear that out, with 90,000 inmates returning to California’s prisons every year.

But compare that to the Braille program here at Folsom. Inmates are learning to translate books for the blind. In 20 years, not a single inmate who has been part of the program has ever returned to prison. This year, the program has been cut back to 19 inmates.

Meanwhile, the Schwarzenegger Administration is about to use federal money to increase funding for anti-drug units, which will actually send more nonviolent drug offenders to prison at a time when federal judges have mandated the reduction of the population by 44,000.

This is insanity.  But members of the political class, for the most part, still want to be seen as daddy protectors, and will gladly institute the exact same failed policies that have thrown the system into crisis.

We have a moment here, with $1.2 billion in mandated cuts, to create legitimate policies that can both cut costs and reduce the prison population while actually making the state safer.  The recent Chino prison riot has led editorialists to come out for sensible prison policies, understanding the connection between stuffing hundreds of thousands of people into modified public storage units and the potential for unrest.

Jean Ross argued on our panel that lawmakers will probably pass the buck and let the judicial branch take the heat for any individual consequences to early release.  That would be a mistake, particularly if in the process, they jettison the founding of an independent sentencing commission that would finally address the runaway sentencing laws at the heart of the crisis.  The clock is ticking on whether we will have any leadership on this issue, as a report is demanded by the federal judges in mid-September.  This is an organizing opportunity, a chance to show an ossified political class that we care about more than just being Tough On Crime.

Below are what will approximate my opening remarks at today’s Netroots Nation panel on the California budget and political crisis.  If you’re in the room (or not), you can participate in the session by submitting questions on Twitter using the #cabudget or the #cabudgetNN09 hashtags, or posting in the comments here.  Consider this an Open Thread for the panel, featuring myself, Robert Cruickshank, Kai Stinchcombe and Jean Ross of the California Budget Project.

*****

Over the last several months, we have started to see a lot of attention at the national level devoted to this topic of the California budget crisis.  And this would be pleasing to me, if it wasn’t for the minor point that all of it has been wrong.  One hundred percent, no exceptions, wrong.  You can start by the insistence on referring to it as a budget crisis.  I’ll give you a related example.  Right now we’re seeing this debate over health care, and the intensity of the town hall meetings and misinformation provided by Republicans and their allies in the health care industry.  But really, none of that has to happen.  With a Democratic President, and large majorities in the House and Senate, there should be no problem finding a majority that supports some form of decent legislation which includes insurance reforms and a public option to provide competition.  But you have the hurdle of the filibuster in the Senate.  In fact, the very undemocratic nature of the Senate itself, where the state of California and the state of Wyoming have the same representation despite one having over 70 times as many residents as the other, distorts the debate and creates abstractions from the expressed will of the people and the political will in Washington.  Now, that ought to be understood as a political crisis, not a crisis over what to do about health care but a crisis about how to leap the institutional hurdles.  Well, take that situation, multiply it by 10 orders of magnitude, and you start to understand  the nature of the problem in California.  

We have a center-left electorate and a center-right political system in which they must operate.  And sure, Democrats in the state could do a much better job at negotiation and advocacy.  But my contention is that this is not a problem of personality but process, and that process has created the crisis which we now face.  We could elect Noam Chomsky Governor next year and still be saddled with the structural hurdles that must be jettisoned before we can even return to a baseline of sane and responsible governance in California.

And while the worst economic hole since the Great Depression certainly accelerated the problem, this is not the result of a perfect storm of factors contributing to the demise.  It was a 70-year bout of rain, and at every step of the way, nobody properly challenged this slip into an ungovernable system.  So it’s going to take a lot of time to restore democracy to California, just as it took so much time to take it away.  But I believe that we can solve this problem in a way that can truly be a harbinger for the country at large, which is the state’s reputation.  If we can really work to figure out the proper model for government that allows for the will of the people to be reflected in policy and provides the accountability for the public so they know whether or not they like the policy results, we will not only have saved California, but the whole nation.  So that’s what we’ll be talking about today.  

This week, Remote Area Medical, an organization that got its start providing health care services to the impoverished in the Third World, descended on Inglewood to provide those same services to the most disenfranchised group, from a medical care standpoint, in the industrialized world – the uninsured and underinsured in America.

They came for new teeth mostly, but also for blood pressure checks, mammograms, immunizations and acupuncture for pain. Neighboring South Los Angeles is a place where health care is scarce, and so when it was offered nearby, word got around.

For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday – starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours – for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.

Like a giant MASH unit, the floor of the Forum, the arena where Madonna once played four sold-out shows, housed aisle upon aisle of dental chairs, where drilling, cleaning and extracting took place in the open. A few cushions were duct-taped to a folding table in a coat closet, an examining room where Dr. Eugene Taw, a volunteer, saw patients.

These were not only uninsured patients, over 1,500 in the first day alone, but underinsured patients who cannot get the services they need with their coverage.

No cable news outlet discussing health care reform and the town halls around it ever get around to mentioning this reality.  In the poorest areas of this country, health care access is so nonexistent that people will wait around for days in their cars, driving for sometimes hundreds of miles, to find a volunteer clinic that they now use as their primary care physician.  South Los Angeles lost one of its only health care providers when King-Drew Medical Center shut down a couple years back, and really nobody, outside of Remote Area Medical, has filled the breach.  This is an absolute tragedy, and at the end of the day, it costs our medical system far more than it would to cover everyone, because nagging problems only served by free clinics every couple years eventually find their way into the emergency room.  And the disconnect between this circumstance and those right-wingers yelling and shrieking across the country is striking.

The enormous response to the free care was a stark corollary to the hundreds of Americans who have filled town-hall-style meetings throughout the country, angrily expressing their fear of the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the nation’s health care system. The bleachers of patients also reflected the state’s high unemployment, recent reduction in its Medicaid services for the poor and high deductibles and co-payments that have come to define many employer-sponsored insurance programs.

Somebody should leak to one of the astroturf groups activating the right about these town halls that there will be a major Congressional event over at the Forum in Inglewood, and then sit back and watch their face sink when they show up to protest and instead encounter the horrors of this broken system.

John Garamendi has been seeking votes in California for well over 30 years.  He first took a run for the Governor’s mansion in 1982, and was set to do so again in 2010 until the seat in CA-10 opened up, and he was inspired to return to Washington, where he served in the Clinton Administration in the Department of the Interior.  He has the most diverse record of anybody in the race, with stints at the federal level, the state legislature, and in two statewide offices, as the Insurance Commissioner and now Lieutenant Governor.  In our interview, we discussed health care, lessons learned from regulating insurance, No Child Left Behind, saving the NUMMI plant in Fremont (more on that from Garamendi here), and foreign policy in Iran.  I found Garamendi to come at issues in a very comprehensive and thoughtful way, and you can see this for yourself below.  A paraphrased transcript follows. (flip it)

DD: Thanks for talking with me today.

John Garamendi: My pleasure.

DD: So how’s it going out there on the campaign trail?

JG: It’s going very well.  Every day, I feel we’re moving along well.  You have everything being done that is normally done in these campaigns.  We have a strong volunteer grassroots organization committed to getting out the vote.  Phonebanking has started, we’ve hit about 30-40 thousand homes.  We’re walking in different communities.  We just had a meeting in Rossmore, with 300 people turning out.  So I think it’s going very well.

DD: Your last several campaigns have been statewide, with district-level campaigning being more retail, how are you finding it?

JG: To me, it’s exactly the same, only it’s done in a smaller area.  I’ve always believed strongly in retail politics.  The only difference is that after the event’s over, I don’t have to get on a Southwest Airlines plane.  We did an African-American church out in Fairfield over the weekend, same as any African-American church in Southern California or anywhere else.  It’s just easier for travel.

DD: OK, let’s hit some issues.  First off, health care.  August is this time where everyone’s making their feelings known about health care in their districts.  What are you hearing in yours?

JG: I am hearing a strong element for single payer, or Medicare for All.  As you may know, I’ve led that debate in this state for many, many years.  I’ve always found it the most efficient, most cost-effective way you can possibly do this.  Just send your premiums to the Medicare office.

So I hear a lot of individuals trending in that direction.  And some of the unions, the California Nurses Association, are also trending in that direction.  There is also a concern about the complexity of the legislation moving through Congress.  And people want to see at the very least a public option to compete with the insurance companies.  Also, with a lot of seniors, the drug issues concern them, both with fixing some of the issues with Medicare Part D and also maintaining what they like about Medicare.  So that’s the range.

DD: Would you vote for any bill that didn’t have at the least a public option that’s available from day one, without a trigger?

JG: Well, I’ve always been a strong voice for Medicare for All.  The fallback position is the public option.  That’s already a compromise.  And so the legislation had to have a public option, I can’t go any further away from that.  The other thing I want to express is that I understand insurance reform, which is a lot of this bill.  I was the main regulator for insurance companies in the largest state in the union.  So I bring a set of knowledge to this debate that not only doesn’t exist among my competitors, but doesn’t exist in Congress.

DD: Let’s talk about that.  Right now, insurance companies are regulated in the states, and so the regulations vary from one place to the next, and can be corrupted by local interests.  Do you support a federal role in insurance regulation?

JG: This is something that we have to figure out with insurance reform and with respect to financial regulation.  The regulatory mechanisms need some clarity.  It simply won’t work to write a law saying to the insurance companies, “Take all comers.”  They will not do it.  So you need a police force.  Someone to enforce that law.  Will that be federal, or based where it is now, at the state level?  That’s the kind of detail that must be worked out.  I mean, we’ve had auto insurance here in California that’s supposed to take all comers, and they find numerous ways to avoid that.  And of course, this is why I support Medicare for All.  You don’t have to worry about any of that.  But as long as we’re going with health insurance reform, I can add something to that process.

DD: What are the pluses and minuses of putting this in the hands of the Feds?

JG: If it’s a federal process, you’d have to set up a massive new federal bureaucracy.  In the positive sense.  But you have to have a police force, because otherwise, the insurers won’t do it.  That’s a major, expensive undertaking for the federal government.  There’s an advantage to the existing mechanism in that it already exists, like with Medicare or Medicaid.  However, you mentioned some of the problems with how the regulation changes depending on the state.  So both options have shortcomings.  Either way, if we have a bill based on insurance reform, it has to be dealt with.  And I’ve been dealing with these companies for eight years of my life.  I know how to do this.

DD: Medicare for All will apparently get a vote now.  Is that helpful?

JG: It’s enormously helpful.  It got pushed to the side of the debate for too long.  Medicare provides about 60% of the care in dollar terms already in this country, and it’s very popular.  If you bring the rest of the population in, on a per-person basis, the cost would decline dramatically.  The money in the private system is good enough to get this done and cover everybody.  And the other important thing is that Medicare allows individual choice of provider.  Whatever doctor you like, you can keep them.  Of course, we know that private insurance restricts your choice of doctor.  So this is the big lie in this debate, the idea that Medicare would have government telling you what doctor to pick.  That’s what happens right now.

DD: Let’s move on.  I noticed on your website you took a lot of time talking about the need to rebuild manufacturing.  We’re seeing this cash for clunkers program becoming very successful as an economic stimulus for the auto industry.  Is that the kind of incentive-based programs that we can use to bring back manufacturing to America?

JG: Not exactly.  The auto industry is not central, but it is important.  That’s why I’m trying to save the NUMMI plant.  1,200 businesses are direct suppliers to NUMMI.  The auto supply industry is one of the largest in America.  So cash for clunkers will help NUMMI.  But what I’m talking about with respect to manufacturing is an economic theory that I developed in the 1980s.  Basically, I figured that you need certain things to maintain the ability to lead as an economic power.  You need a world-class education system and a commitment to research and development.  Through both of those, you can create new things, with a high profit margin, whatever those things are, but new innovations that people find valuable.  Eventually, those new things become a commodity, and once that happens, like all commodities, it seeks the lowest-wage place to be made.  So those things get pushed off, and you have to create more new things, to keep feeding that engine.  So that’s what I’m talking about, high-end manufacturing.

DD: Couldn’t the NUMMI plant be retooled to serve as a place to manufacture those new things, be they innovations in solar or wind technology or new batteries?

JG: Well, we tried this a few years back.  I endorsed a bill in the legislature to provide a specific exemption for sales tax on manufacturing equipment to retool the NUMMI plant for hybrid vehicles.  And that probably would have been enough to keep NUMMI open.  But it didn’t pass.  Right now, what we’re doing is putting together a package for NUMMI of incentives that will hopefully keep them in California.  But it’s more complex than that.  This is like a divorce.  You have GM and Toyota fighting over who owns what widget on the line.  So there are legal issues in play now.  I think we can get it done, because that’s a very efficient plant, one of the most efficient in the country.  But we have to manage this divorce.

DD: Education is another issue you talk about a lot.  The Department of Education just put out this Race to the Top program to offer money to the states with good outcomes, but they are restricting the funds to states which incorporate student testing into teacher evaluations, and because California doesn’t do that, they don’t qualify.  What are your thoughts on that, and this larger divide between education reformers and groups resisting their reforms?

JG: My question about it is basically, what is the equation between the test and teacher evaluations? Are we talking about just the test score? In that case, do I get to choose the students? Because the students and their backgrounds are a contributing factor to their performance. So it’s a complex equation. There’s a socioeconomic element to it. And it’s very difficult to do to take everything into account. I don’t think that testing should be the sole measure of a teacher evaluation. There are multiple factors. My daughter’s a kindergarten teacher, and this year she got to school and there were a lot more kids in her class. So is that a factor? I think we need to evaluate teachers, but we must be fair.

DD: Do you support a reform like paying teachers more to go into poor-performing inner city areas?

JG: I’ve always supported reforms like that. I put up a bill in the 1980s to pay more to math and science teachers, to make sure we were attracting the best of them. And I support sending good teachers into the inner city. We have to pay our teachers better if we want to get the best outcomes.

DD: We are having such a tough time in California, what can the federal government do to alleviate some of the burden here where we are destroying our social safety net during a deep recession?

JG: Well, just to go back to education, one thing the federal government can do is fix No Child Left Behind. It was a great concept, but not good in detail. The reauthorization is coming up, and the Feds had better fund it. You can’t place a burden like that on the states and expect them to deliver. So funding, and some reform of the law, has to get done. I don’t think testing should be the only evaluation of students. There’s a place for it, but we’re building a nation of robots by teaching to the test. I have significant concerns about No Child Left Behind that need to be addressed.

DD: What about beyond that. Would you support a second stimulus focused on the states?

JG: I don’t know whether there will be a second stimulus. But the problem is pretty elemental. California is the 7th, 8th-wealthiest place on Earth. We have made a decision, and it was a decision, not to invest in education. We have plenty of money to fund it, but we made the decision not to. The leadership has refused to use that wealth in the greatest resource we have, and that’s our education system. It’s clear to me that the federal government cannot substitute for the effort that California must make for themselves. We need investment, coupled with serious reform, to break the gridlock. Voting to tax students by raising college rates is just insanity. And the regents and trustees refused to support legislation for an oil severance tax to fund higher education. I brought it to them, and they wouldn’t support it. We are the only oil producing state with no tax on the natural resources coming out of our ground. The oil companies have been able to take it for free for over a century. It’s madness.

So the federal government cannot substitute for California. But I’ll fight to bring money back to the state. First by funding No Child Left Behind. And also, there’s the issue of medical services. The formula for state participation in Medicaid in California is 50-50, an even split between the Feds and the state. In other big states, that ratio is different. In Illinois, New York, it’s more like 60-40, 70-30. Getting a better split in that formula represents a huge amount of money for California. And there are numerous formulas like that. So experience counts in understanding all that.

DD: OK, final question. On your website, I noticed very strong language supporting Israel, and also warning Iran not to continue with their alleged nuclear program. And you advocate for stopping shipments of refined oil to Iran if they refuse to cooperate. Now, I’m assuming that was written before the most recent uprising.

JG: It was, yes.

DD: Do you still believe, given the events over there, that it’s a good idea to stop refined oil shipments, when it may hurt not the regime, but the very people in the streets who are resisting it?

JG: There’s no doubt that the effect of an embargo would hit the economy and the people. That’s what it’s designed to do. I’ve thought long and hard about this, after watching the events take place, and I still believe in the concept. What you have over there is the current government’s legitimacy being questioned. Does that mean they are more willing to negotiate on the nuclear program, to bring something tangible to the people? We don’t know. So I think you have to pull together the interested groups, and that’s Europe, and Russia, Pakistan, the Arab states, they might be more interested than us. And you create a larger coalition to change the behavior of the government. The uprising actually helps in that regard. And like in any negotiation, you have to have a big stick. So I would not drop the embargo possibility. And again, all of this is down the road a piece. Now another big stick would be bombing their facilities, and I think there are some unadvisable consequences to that. So I’d rather use the other stick.

DD: Thanks so much for talking to me today.

JG: Thank you.

The federal ruling to reduce the prison population by over 40,000 is the result of a years-long, if not decades-long process, where the failed leaders run amok in Sacramento have let the corrections system grow completely out of control, preferring to warehouse prisoners into modified Public Storage units instead of embarking on same, smart policies that would save us money and make us safer.  In response to this damaging comment on the state’s failure, the political leadership has… signed up for more failure:

Attorney General Jerry Brown said in an interview that the order is probably not appealable, but eventually the state will have to consider going directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, marking the first time the high court would face such a case.

“I think the Supreme Court would see it differently,” Brown said.

State officials said the proper solution is for the governor and legislators to work out a reduction plan as funding becomes available. The state should not be forced to function under the hammer of a federal court order, they said.

“We just don’t agree that the federal courts should be ordering us to take these steps,” said Matthew Cate, secretary of the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

How dare the federal courts order anyone around to respect Constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment!  Who the hell do they think they are, a co-equal branch of government?

What’s so interesting about this is how abnormal it is.  Federal courts grant a significant amount of leeway to the states to manage affairs.  But when a state consistently and deliberately violates Constitutional rights without letup, they must act.  And that’s been true for a long time.

California’s archipelago of 33 prisons houses more than 170,000 inmates, nearly twice the number it was designed to safely hold. Almost all of its facilities are bursting at the seams: More than 16,000 prisoners sleep on what are known as “ugly beds” – extra bunks stuffed into cells, gyms, dayrooms, and hallways. [Governor Arnold] Schwarzenegger has referred to the system as a “powder keg.”

….Even as Schwarzenegger has promised reform, the corrections budget has exploded during his term, from $4.7 billion in fiscal 2004 to nearly $10 billion in fiscal 2007, or about $49,000 for each adult inmate.

….For more than three decades, California has been trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle where putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has become the answer to every new crime to capture the public’s attention – from drug dealing and gangbanging to tragic child abductions. Spurred on by a powerful prison guards’ union and politicians afraid of looking soft on crime, corrections has become a bottomless pit, where countless lives and dollars disappear year after year. And now that it has metastasized to the point where even a tough-guy governor and the guards agree that the prisons must be downsized or else (see “When Prison Guards Go Soft”), every attempt at change seems stymied by inertia. The sheer size of the system has become the biggest obstacle to finding alternatives to warehousing criminals without preparing them for anything more than another cycle of incarceration. “The public believes the prison population reflects the crime rate,” says James Austin, a corrections consultant who has served on several prison-reform panels in California. “That’s just not true. It’s because of California’s policies and the way it runs the system.”

This is a policy failure driven by a political failure, a cowardly series of actions that arises from a broken system of government.  Dan Walters happens to be spot-on today – politicians have played on people’s fears for 30 years and, faced with the tragedy they created, delayed and procrastinated until it became so torturous that the courts had to step in.  From the three-strikes law to the 1,000 sentencing laws passed by the Legislature, all increasing sentences, nobody comes out looking good in this failure of leadership.  Even the Attorney General of the United States recognizes that we cannot jail our way out of crime problems.

“We will not focus exclusively on incarceration as the most effective means of protecting public safety,” Holder told the American Bar Association delegates meeting here for their annual convention. “Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened.”

“Today, one out of every 100 adults in America is incarcerated – the highest incarceration rate in the world,” he said. But the country has reached a point of diminishing returns at which putting even greater percentages of America’s citizens behind bars won’t cut the crime rate.

Mark Kleiman has additional good thoughts.

A ruling by the three-judge panel who have effectively taken control of the California prison system has ordered the state to reduce the prison population by as much as 40,000 44,000 inmates within the next two years, finding the system in violation of Constitutional mandates.  The Tough On Crime balloon has just popped.

The judges said that reducing prison crowding in California was the only way to change what they called an unconstitutional prison health care system that causes one unnecessary death a week. In a scathing 184-page order, the judges criticized state officials, saying they had failed to comply with previous orders to fix the health care system in the prisons and reduce crowding, and recommended remedies, including reform of the parole system.

The special three-judge panel also described a chaotic prison system where prisoners were stacked in triple bunk beds in gymnasiums, hallways and day rooms; where single guards were often forced to monitor scores of inmates at a time; and where ill inmates died for lack of treatment.

“In these overcrowded conditions, inmate-on-inmate violence is almost impossible to prevent, infectious diseases spread more easily, and lockdowns are sometimes the only means by which to maintain control,” the panel wrote. “In short, California’s prisons are bursting at the seams and are impossible to manage.”

This started as a series of lawsuits claiming that the overcrowded prisons violated inmates’ Constitutional right to medical care through the 8th Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment while under confinement.  The judges concluded that massive reductions were the only way to get the balance right and restore Constitutional order to the process.

It’s nothing less than an epic failure at all levels of leadership over the last thirty years which has brought us to the point where judges must mandate reductions in the prisons.  A state that is unable to manage its finances can also clearly not manage its plainly illegal corrections system.

This now hangs over the head of lawmakers as they come back from recess in August and determine how to achieve $1.2 billion dollars in savings to the prison system.  The Governor and Democrats in the legislature have proscribed various reform programs that would reduce the prison population, change mandatory prison sentences for technical parole violation, and create an independent sentencing commission to look at reforming our draconian sentencing policies.  Many of these reforms are desperately needed, would save money for the state and also comprise a smarter, more sensible way to deal with prisons that actually makes Californians safer.  Today’s ruling makes this not only a good set of ideas, but a mandatory set, given that the state is now under court order to reduce the population.

The Governor’s Prisons Secretary Matthew Cate is not ruling out appealing the ruling to the US Supreme Court.  He also claims that the state has a plan to reduce overcrowding that would lower the number of prisoners by 35,000 in two years.  That’s less than required by the ruling.  But this is no longer an option; unless they appeal, and it’s no guarantee they can, the state must submit a plan to meet the judges’ dictates within 45 days.  End of story.

We’ve already seen a trend of national columnists using California’s budget woes to conveniently push whatever obsession they want.  Two more of these land on the nation’s most august op-ed pages today, both of them inaccurate and out of touch with the nature of the situation here in the Golden State.

First we have fiscal scold Robert Samuelson trying to use California’s budget crisis to make a larger point about a national “fiscal reckoning.”  He claims that California has “made more promises than its economy can easily support,” as has the nation, and only fiscal austerity can remedy the problem.

On paper, the state could solve its budget problems by raising taxes further. But in practice, that might backfire by weakening the economy and tax base. California scores poorly in state ratings of business climate. In a CNBC survey, it ranked 32nd overall but last in “cost of business” and 49th in “business friendliness.” Information technology (Intel, Google, Hewlett Packard) and biotechnology remain strengths, but some traditional industries are struggling. High costs, as well as tax breaks from other states, have caused movie studios to shift production from Southern California. In 1996, feature films involved 14,500 production days in the Los Angeles area, says FilmL.A.; in 2008, the figure was half that.

So California is stretched between a precarious economy and a strong popular desire for government. The state’s wrenching experience suggests that, as a nation, we should begin to pare back government’s future commitments to avoid a similar fate. But California’s experience also suggests we’ll remain in denial, prisoners of wishful thinking, until the fateful reckoning arrives in the unimagined future.

Ezra Klein does a pretty good job with this column, noting it provides a lesson for the difference between fiscal responsibility and fiscal conservatism.  Samuelson, of course, is the latter, wanting a low-tax, low-spending country.  Rather than arguing for a balanced solution, Samuelson eschews taxes due to the “business climate,” even though many businesses cite the lack of investment in education and infrastructure that Samuelson is CALLING for as a reason for their concern about their future in the state.  In addition, the “businesses are leaving California” argument is a myth applied to all states by fiscal scolds as a means for them to race to the bottom and provide as many corporate tax breaks as possible.  Which California has done, to the tune of $2 billion a year, at a time when funding for state parks and domestic violence shelters and poison control units gets slashed.  Ezra adds:

Samuelson implies otherwise, but California isn’t a particularly high-taxing state. Total state and local taxes take up 11.73 percent of the average Californian’s income. The national average is 11.23 percent. And it’s been like that for many years […]

Nor is California’s spending on education somehow out of the ordinary. The state ranks 29th in the country on education spending (much lower per pupil; try 47th: ed.). And recent tax cuts haven’t been helping the Golden State out. This graph from the California Budget Project shows the contribution that decades of tax cuts have made to the state’s current fiscal crisis. It’s a pretty depressing story […] The budget deal that Arnold Schwarzenegger just accepted contained $15 billion in spending reductions. Absent the tax cuts of the last few decades, most of those reductions wouldn’t be needed (add the vehicle license fee increase and you’re talking about a surplus: ed.).

Samuelson is essentially making an argument about the kind of government he likes, using the California situation to illustrate it, the facts be damned.

Next up is Ross Douthat, who uses the California mess and contrasts it with Texas to create some notion of red states faring better in the recession, also at odds with the facts:

Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state – pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl – into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area.

Douthat also throws in the “rich businesses and rich people are fleeing California” canard, which as stated above is untrue about businesses and even less true about rich individuals.

Steve Benen deconstructs the argument about Texas being a great economic steward and California a basket case, and the reasons why.  As Benen says, Texas is the worst state in America for the uninsured and the second-worst state for poverty rates.  To conservatives who judge the progress of a state by the budgetary balance sheet and not the prosperity of the citizenry, I’m sure they are a model citizen.

Meanwhile, calling California a “liberal laboratory” and not recognizing the source of the crisis, namely the conservative veto on the budget process, speaks to Douthat’s complete ignorance about the nature of the state.  In addition, as Paul Krugman notes, there is no correlation between a state’s perceived ideology and their economic performance (two of the highest-unemployed states are South Carolina and Tennessee), nor is there any correlation between the level of taxation and the current unemployment rate.

I know that the dysfunction of what is seen on the national level as a blue state is an inviting target for conservative columnists to spin some wider tale about liberal failure and conservative ascendancy.  If only they had any knowledge of the actual facts involved.