I was rendered almost ill by John Edwards’ stance in the debate against the decriminalization of marijuana because “it would send the wrong signal to young people.”  Chris Dodd made a strong response that cut to the heart of our failed prison policy.

DODD: Can I respond, I mean just why I think it ought to be? We’re locking up too many people in our system here today. We’ve got mandatory minimum sentences that are filling our jails with people who don’t belong there. My idea is to decriminalize this, reduce that problem here. We’ve gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country. We’ve go to get a lot smarter about this issue than we are, and as president, I’d try and achieve that.

This, of course, is most acute in California, where we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop on a federal court order that could potentially force the release of thousands of prisoners due to overcrowding.  State Sen. Gloria Romero held her ground and didn’t allow the usual spate of tougher sentencing bills to pass the Legislature this year.  So once again, George and Sharon Runner will go to the ballot with a punitive measure designed to make themselves look tough while further battering a crippled prison system.

A year after bringing to California Jessica’s Law, the crackdown on sex offenders, the husband-and-wife team of state Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner announced Monday a new initiative that would target gang members for tougher prosecution and dedicate nearly $1 billion annually to enforcement and intervention.

The Republican legislators from Lancaster hope to collect enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November 2008 ballot, and they have the backing of the father of the state’s three-strikes law as well as law enforcement officials, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

The Legislature has already rejected this bill, and it would again constrain the state budget with another walled-off mandate while doing nothing to address the major crisis in overcrowding.  It’s feel-good nonsense for “tough-on-crime” advocates.

By the way, let’s see how the last initiative the Runners promoted, Jessica’s Law, is working out:

Hundreds of California sex offenders who face tough new restrictions on where they can live are declaring themselves homeless, making it difficult for the state to track them.

Jessica’s Law, approved by 70 percent of California voters a year ago, bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children gather. That leaves few places where offenders can live legally.

Some who have had trouble finding a place to live are avoiding re-arrest by reporting that they are homeless – falsely, in some cases.

Experts say it is hard to monitor sex offenders when they lie about their address or are living day-to-day in cheap hotels, homeless shelters or on the street. It also means they may not be getting the treatment they need.

“We could potentially be making the world more dangerous rather than less dangerous,” said therapist Gerry Blasingame, past chairman of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending.

I agree with all of that except the word “potentially.”  We felt good about “getting tough” on sex offenders, and now we have them living under bridges and untrackable.  How do you think “getting tough” on gang violence is going to work out?

I’ve written a lot about the California prison crisis in the past, and the last 11 posts I’ve done about it in the last four months have yielded a mere 25 comments.  It’s clear to me that there’s a lot of apathy around the issue, combined with twinges of helplessness and the paralyzing recognition that there are no easy answers.  It’s the ultimate “out of sight, out of mind” situation, and as a result, we end up warehousing prisoners, “stacking them up like cordwood” and conveniently forgetting about what goes on behind bars.

Well, you no longer have to take my word for it.  You can watch Ted Koppel’s riveting two-hour documentary for the Discovery Channel, “Breaking Point,” an exploration of life inside Solano State Prison in Vacaville, CA.  And while you’re at it, you can make 121 copies and send one to every member of the California Legislature and the Governor, so they can witness the fruits of their failed leadership. over…

Designed to accommodate no more than 100,000 inmates, California’s prisons now hold 173,000, each at an annual cost of $43,000. How did things get so out of control? Mandatory sentencing is a big part of the answer. When California voters threw their support behind a get-tough-on-crime bill that came to be known as “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” the state prison system filled up and is now overflowing.

While shooting, Koppel spent a number of days among the general population at Solano. His reporting focuses on the inhabitants of H Dorm, where inmates are stacked in triple-deck bunk beds on an old indoor basketball court. Correctional officers are so badly outnumbered that prison officials keep inmates segregated by race and gang affiliation in a desperate effort to avoid friction and maintain control. Even so, Solano still sees three to four race riots a year. Using smuggled cell phones, gang bosses continue running criminal operations on the street from behind prison walls. At the same time, they’re running drug and prostitution rings inside Solano.

By the way, that segregation is scheduled to end, by court order, come January, and you can expect the race wars to explode (there are already 3-4 large riots annually in a place like Solano as it is).  The corrections officers have, out of convenience, allowed race to govern every aspect of prison life, and shocking the system through integration, just like it did within civil society in the 1950s, is going to cause an explosion.  In the words of one inmate, “Somebody’s son’s gonna die.”  This is going to get worse, much worse.  And the root cause of all of it is the overcrowding issue, which nobody wants to fully address.

The “stack them up like cordwood” line comes from Mark Klaas, whose daughter Polly’s brutal murder ushered in the three strikes sentencing law, which is now rarely being used to capture the kind of violent offenders like the ones involved in her crime.  2/3 of all of the inmates at Solano as a result of the three strikes law struck out on a nonviolent offense.  And these are precisely the inmates who are clogging the system.  Every corrections officer interviewed agreed that tough sentencing laws like three strikes aren’t working.  And even Mark Klaas, whose “cordwood” line represented his earlier state of mind, now believes that we’re “not going to solve the crime problem by building more prisons.”  Only rehabilitation, treatment, and prevention can truly address this crisis.  And here is where the California penal system comes up woefully short.

While 85% of the population at Solano enters prison with either a prior or current substance abuse problem, only 10% will be able to enter the drug treatment and counseling program; there simply aren’t enough spaces.  Only 12% engage in some kind of vocational training, acquiring skills that can potentially be put to good use on the outside.  In fact, the best vocational training in California prisons these days is for crime itself.  “This is a school where you can learn all kinds of crime,” says one official, accounting for the nation’s highest recidivism rate.  And so once their sentences expire, we send these ex-cons off into the world with $200 and a bus ticket, with no skills, no treatment, no job, in many cases no place to live, largely worse off than they were when they entered prison, and we’re surprised when they return?

Koppel’s program does an excellent job of revealing life in the overcrowded prison complex, where even solitary confinement is double occupancy.  Building more prisons so they can simply be housed makes no sense whatsoever.  In the short term, overcrowded county jails will transfer their prisoners up to the state level.  In the long term, more will filter into the system every day without addressing the root causes.  Building costs money, too, money that won’t go to rehabilitation and vocational training and drug treatment and additional officers (who are completely outmanned).  “Nonviolent criminals should not be in this prison.”  Those words of wisdom come from a PRISONER. 

The documentary is a bit short on solutions, making no mention of the proposed independent sentencing commission that fell flat in this year’s legislative session.  But it expertly displays the crisis at hand.  I urge you to watch this important piece of work.  And at the Discovery Channel website, you can take a virtual tour of Solano, see portraits of some of the inmates, and get some more quick facts about prison life.  This is a responsibility from which citizens and our so-called leaders in Sacramento must not shrink.

Today the Joint Economic Committee, composed of Senators Webb and Schumer along with New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, held a hearing on certainly the most underappreciated issue facing America – our prison crisis.  Here’s part of Rep. Maloney’s statement:

The United States has the highest incarceration rates in the world, with more than 2 million Americans currently in jails or prisons. Clearly, imprisonment benefits society and is an important public safety measure. But faced with an unprecedented increase in incarceration, we must ask ourselves whether we are striking the right balance between the costs and benefits of imprisonment. 

Putting more resources into creating economic opportunities that provide alternatives to crime would pay dividends in reducing crime and incarceration, while also strengthening families and communities.

We all know that in the long run crime doesn’t pay, but it sure is costly. The average annual cost of incarceration for one federal prisoner exceeds $20,000 – far more than the average annual cost of $3,700 for a youth program, $6,000 for a job training program or the $13,000 for tuition at public universities. 

There is no question that crime rates have dropped in the U.S. over the past decade. Researchers agree that the increase in incarceration rates have been driven by tougher sentences for repeat offenders and drug offenders, mandatory minimums, and a more punitive approach to post-release supervision, rather than an increase in crime.

These are precisely the problems that California faces, due to a complete failure of legislative leadership and a panoply of thousands of tougher sentencing laws.  Today Dan Weintraub reports on the stirrings of a long-overdue reform of the system, before it’s too late.

The Schwarzenegger administration, which has been cautious to a fault when it comes to prison reform, is tiptoeing back toward the idea of loosening restrictions on parolees who are good bets to stay out of trouble.

The program is starting with a trial run in Orange County, where ex-cons who are considered the lowest risks and then meet a series of benchmarks will be cut loose from state super- vision after six months instead of three years.

The idea is to give those parolees an incentive to get their lives back on stable ground shortly after they leave prison, which is when most felons return to a life of crime. Then, by letting them off parole early, the state figures it will be able to concentrate more resources on more-dangerous felons who need the most attention.

Parole reform is to prison reform as S-CHIP is to the broader health care issue.  It’s a baby step on the road to really making those tough decisions.  But it’s taken so long to get to this point, and change is being forced only through a crisis and a potential capping of the prison population, that I guess we have to be happy for what we get.  There’s going to be major pushback on this from the right (it’s already happening on the Flush Report) so it’s important that this under-the-radar issue gets attention and support.

On Monday, the three-judge panel with the power to cap California’s prison population will meet for an organizational meeting.  While the prison healthcare system is already in receivership, the panel might want to take into account these grim statistics about the state of health, and how the overcrowding issue impacts everything else in prison life.

As many as one in six deaths of California prison inmates last year might have been preventable, according to a study of medical care in 32 state lockups that will be used to help rebuild the troubled system.

One inmate, who reported extreme chest pains in the middle of the night, died of a heart ailment after waiting eight hours to see a doctor.

Another who complained for days of severe abdominal pain died of acute pancreatitis after medical staff did not believe his pleas were credible.

A third died after a two-year delay in diagnosis of his testicular cancer.

And an asthma patient died after failing to receive steroid medication for two days following transfer from a county jail.

In fact, ASTHMA was the ailment most likely to cause a preventable death.  Not a shiv in the shower, not a rumble in the exercise yard.  Asthma.  This is straight out of the 19th century.

Between delays in diagnosis, failure to treat symptoms properly, and lack of access to doctors, the common thread here is that there aren’t enough doctors, aren’t enough facilities, and aren’t enough overseers to adequately care for inmates.  It comes directly out of the overcrowding that is plaguing everything in the corrections process. 

Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which represents prison doctors, said: “We feel that the doctors in [the prisons] have been working in a battlefield situation. They do not have the tools to practice good medicine. The system needs work.”

The cost of reorganizing the healthcare system will be enormous and take over a decade.  It’d be a lot easier if sentencing reform allowed the jails to have a manageable population, but leadership was not forthcoming in this session.  This is the result.

There will be no sentencing and parole reform coming out of Sacramento this year.  Do you know what that means?  It means that this man will be in our state’s corrections system for the next 12-20 years because military doctors addicted him to opiates.

Sargent Binkley is a high school classmate of ours and West Point graduate who is currently facing twenty-odd years in prison for robbing a Walgreens under California’s minimum sentencing laws. He used a gun (unloaded) and robbed the drugstores of only Percocet – no money, harming nobody.

Here’s the kicker — he was addicted to the opiates after smashing his hip while serving abroad in the Army — the military medical system kept misdiagnosing him, and feeding him more of the painkillers. Add in some serious PTSD (he guarded mass graves in Bosnia from desecration at one point) and he spiraled down.

Sargent turned himself in, has been in a rehab program in county jail for over a year and a half while he awaits sentencing, and by all accounts is doing well. The Santa Clara DA wants to chuck the book at him, and he’ll be gone.

Because the leadership in Sacramento – Republicans and Democrats – have no sense of how to legitimately deal with the crisis in our jails, and would rather look like tough guys and gals while putting sick people in prison.  Sargent Binkley is a sick man.  He needs treatment and aid from a nation which has abandoned him.  Because of our mandatory minimum sentencing law, an angry DA is going to make him spend the next 20 years in a crowded cell.

over..

Sargent was sent to Bosnia after his graduation, where he served as a peacekeeper by guarding the mass graves of genocide victims. From there he was sent to Central America, where he participated in drug interdiction operations. At one point he was ordered to open fire on a truck that contained a civilian teenage boy, an act that haunts him to this day. While on duty in Honduras, he fractured his pelvis and dislocated a hip. This injury was consistently misdiagnosed by Army physicians over the next several years, resulting in chronic pain and an addiction to prescription painkillers.

This is a textbook example of where we are today in Sacramento.  There’s a complete failure of seeing beyond narrow political gamesmanship rather than stepping up to solve problems.  Sentencing commissions have worked all over the country.  They have succeeded in returning corrections systems to its mission, of rehabilitation and treatment.  The current system threatens public safety and needlessly puts sick people behind bars.  If you want to know why nothing gets done in Sacramento, look no further.

It’s beyond obvious that we’re going to have a federal takeover of our prison system.  Schwarzenegger tried to prevent any cap on the population but that was blocked on Tuesday.  The three-judge panel is going to have to take it away from these mewling children who can’t look past their next election to actually do their jobs.

P.S. THE PHARMACIST SARGENT BINKLEY ROBBED is on the record supporting him.  You can support him too.  And one way is to demand that the politicians we elect actually move the state forward instead of this ugly slow motion.  If not, we’ll get new politicians.

Sentencing reform is one of the many bills on the docket today, which looks to be the last day for the California Legislature, though that’s subject to change.  In my view this is the signature issue the legislature faces: will they step up and respond to an crisis, or will they cower in the face of having to be “tough on crime” and reject anything but building our way out of the prison problem.  Frank Russo defines the terms here.  Basically there are two bills, each of which has passed their respective chamber.  SB 110 (by Sen. Gloria Romero) calls for an independent sentencing commission without restrictions on what sentences they can look at; AB 160 appears to restrict anything passed through the initiative process, which shields three strikes.  Apparently there’s a third bill in the mix:

• Both SB 110 (Romero), which failed on the Assembly floor 34 to 38 and which can be brought up under reconsideration, and AB 160 (Lieber), which had been holed up in the Senate Rules Committee and has been sprung to the Senate floor, can be voted on. If Romero’s bill advances, there is a play with AB 1708 (Swanson) on the Senate floor that could amend SB 110, clean it up, and perhaps make it more acceptable to the Assembly. Both houses of the legislature have passed fairly similar sentencing commission bills, although with heated debates and opposition from Republicans.

Whether it’s intra-legislative jealousy between the chambers or a desire to look tough to voters, if nothing moves on sentencing today, our representatives will have a lot to answer for.  This is worth a phone call to your Assemblymember and Senator today.

The State Assembly rejected the only sensible reform that would do anything to deal with the root causes of a prison crisis that has been built by 30 years of progressively draconian sentencing laws.  SB110 (Romero) would have created an independent sentencing commission with the ability to rewrite sentencing laws outside of a political culture obsessed with “tough on crime” poses.  Everybody with even a modicum of understanding of the prison crisis knows that the overcrowding (at a time when crime is down) is a direct result of mandatory minimums and three strikes and the multitudes of nonviolent offenders serving long sentences in our jails, some as a result of the War on (some kinds of) Drugs.

Now, there is a bill, AB160 by Sally Lieber, voted out of the Assembly earlier this year, that is similar to the bill Sen. Romero authored.  But, there are some substantive differences, otherwise how do you understand these quotes:

Romero likened the defeat of her bill to the Legislature’s throwing up its hands and telling federal judges to take control of the troubled prison system.

Don Specter, an attorney with the inmate advocate group Prison Law Office, said the vote “certainly emphasizes the one-dimensional approach California has to crime, which is to build more prisons.”

You can read the Romero bill and the Lieber bill, still pending in the State Senate (It passed the appropriate committee by a 9-7 vote).  The Lieber bill can’t touch sentences established through the initiative process (so this is probably about saving three strikes from scrutiny).  The Romero bill would have made recommendations to amend those types of sentences.  Overall the Romero bill is more comprehensive.  This could be some kind of petty jealousy between the chambers.

Hopefully the Senate shows some leadership and passes the Lieber bill, which would at least move things in the right direction.  Until then, on the flip I’m going to list those Democrats who would rather hang on to their little fiefdoms of “tough on crime” sentencing than enact the only proper reform to deal with a crisis that now will almost certainly be handled by the courts.

Voting No:

Arambula, AD-31 (Fresno)
Fuentes, AD-39 (Sylmar) (WHAT???)
Galgiani, AD-17 (Tracy)
Lieu, AD-53 (Torrance)
Nava, AD-35 (Santa Barbara)
Parra, AD-30 (Hanford)
Salas, AD-79 (Chula Vista)
Torrico, AD-20 (Fremont)

Absent, Abstaining, or Not Voting (occasionally a craven tactic often so they can say that they didn’t vote against it):

Charles Calderon, AD-58 (Whittier)
De Leon, AD-45 (Los Angeles)
Karnette, AD-54 (Long Beach)
Levine, AD-40 (Van Nuys) (Maybe he was absent, but EXCUSE ME????)
Wolk, AD-8 (Davis)

These legislators need to answer to their constituents and explain why they want to keep an unsustainable and broken prison system alive.  Furthermore, the leadership needs to explain why they failed to whip the proper number of votes to get this reform passed.

Let me build on Brian’s post regarding the decision by two separate US District Court judges to convene three-judge panels to consider capping the California prison population.  This should have been completely expected to everyone in the state government.

There is a near-term and a long-term crisis in our state prisons.  So the Governor predictably offered a medium-term solution.  Prisons don’t build themselves overnight, so “adding 53,000 beds” which can only phase in over the course of a couple years does absolutely nothing to address the current situation.  Furthermore, the continued overcrowding, which impacts rehabilitation and treatment and the high recidivism rate, means that by the time those new beds are constructed, the problem will be bigger, and any additional capacity (which doesn’t even cover the CURRENT overcrowding numbers) will be only a temporary solution.  So with root causes unaddressed, there was no way any judge with any sort of conscience could sit idly by and watch as the prison system continues to spiral out of control.  A state government that has COMPLETELY FAILED TO LEAD forced his hand.

over…

This is the first time since the law was established in 1996 offering for this kind of option for federal judges that it has been invoked.  No other system in America is as out of control as the prison system in our state.  And so the judges stepped in because we are violating the Constitution:

First of all, this is not just one judge making findings and a ruling. There are two cases, one before Judge Henderson (Plata) on the prison medical system in which orders were stipulated to (agreed upon) by the parties which included the state of California in 2002 and 2004. The judge has found that those orders have not been complied with. He has based his ruling on the evidence presented, including reports of the Receiver he appointed, last year, Robert Sillen, that document in great detail the problems in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation system.

The other case (Coleman) before Judge Karlton, concerns the medical treatment received by state prisoners with “serious mental disorders,” and has been going on since 1995. In that case, a Special Master, John Hagar, has been appointed by the Judge to investigate and report back to him on how the needs of these mentally ill prisoners have been met. After almost 12 years and 77 orders, the Special Master and the Judge have found the prisons to not be in compliance with the United States Constitution.

Gov. Schwarzenegger is talking about appeal, but there is a voluminous public record documenting this total failure in leadership that has brought our prisons to the crisis point.  But such an appeal will likely take close to a year.  That’s another year where root causes will not be addressed as everyone awaits this decision.

But there’s another way.  The judges have rejected that AB 900, which authorized the construction of the prisons, will be insufficient to deal with the problem.  But if Gloria Romero’s sentencing reform bill, SB 110, can offer a real sea change in empowering an independent commission to recommend and review changes to sentencing law, perhaps the judges can be persuaded that the state is finally moving in the right direction on understanding what needs to be done.  Romero is a lonely voice for sanity on this issue, and with her bill now in the Assembly, she needs to be joined by we the people.  The California Democratic Party has come out in support of sentencing and parole reform.  Every Democratic member of the Assembly needs to be made aware of that fact, and the fact that SB 110 is the ONLY vehicle to get a handle on this unconscionable state prison crisis.  It’s worth a call today.

Grassroots progressives are picking up on my plea to call representatives to publicize what the party has voted to endorse and ensure that state and federal lawmakers will answer the call of their party and support these initiatives.  The first resolution I mentioned was net neutrality; now we should push the resolution on sentencing reform, which I’ve included in the extended entry.

We know that our criminal justice system nationwide is perverse.  For violent and nonviolent offenders alike, it has become a crucible which demands MORE violence as a means to survive. 

This is what our system of justice does: It takes the unlawful and makes them more violent. It takes criminals and makes them worse, reducing their future options, encouraging them to become more physically brutal, cultivating their marginalization from society. Such is the irony of the politics of crime in this country. We are so afraid of violent criminals that we force our politicians to continually worsen their punishment, condemning them to prisons that have been shown to make inmates more violent.

This is especially true in California, home to the highest recidivism rate in the nation, because all of the overcrowding has for all practical purposes eliminated any treatment or rehabilitation programs and turned the jails into human waste dumps.  This is not something we can build our way out from under; it’s too far gone.  Only some meaningful reform that silences the “tough on crime” crowd and revisits the role of incarceration as an opportunity for redemption and a return to civil society will fix this crisis.  AB 900, which enabled the Governor to add 53,000 beds in exchange for token accountability, is already causing concern that even that accountability will be circumvented.  Enough.  The Governor’s plan is overly cautious and seeks to kick the can down the road.  We need real reform.

Schwarzenegger’s prison managers have begun to implement a program to assess each inmate and give him or her an individual program to follow while in prison. They have also begun a comprehensive re-evaluation of every rehabilitation program to determine which work and which should be abandoned.

But the biggest reductions in overcrowding would come from changes in sentencing laws and parole policies. On those issues, Schwarzenegger must lead the way.

California has the highest recidivism rate in the country, with 70 percent of inmates returning to prison within three years after release. What the state has been doing for a generation is not working. The current policies are draining the treasury and making the streets less safe. It’s time to try a new approach.

over…

This weekend at the CDP E-Board, progressives passed a parole and sentencing reform resolution that mirrors Gloria Romero’s legislation to create an independent sentencing commission to address this runaway train we’ve created with our prisons.

CDP RESOLUTION TO SUPPORT PAROLE & SENTENCING REFORM TO ADDRESS OVERCROWDED PRISONS

PASSED at E-Board meeting of the California Democrats in Sacramento

WHEREAS Governor Schwarzengger and California legislators decided to build 53,000 new prison and jail beds at a 25-year cost of $15-billion dollars in construction and debt service funds;

WHEREAS this legislative decision was made without a single public hearing in a state that, according to the California Legislative Analyst, currently incarcerates 240,000 inmates in prisons and jails, almost 70% of  whom are people of color, 29% African American, even though African Americans constitute only 6% of the Adult population;

WHEREAS the current plan to build new prison and jail beds ignores the Governor’s Independent Review Panel and the Little Hoover Commission recommendations for parole and sentencing reform that would immediately and drastically reduce California’s prison population and address the problem of overcrowding in a state that, according to the California Legislative Analyst, spends $43,000 each year to incarcerate but only $8,000 to educate a student in our public schools;

THEREFORE BE  IT RESOLVED the California Democratic Party supports implementation of the state’s Independent Review Panel and the Little Hoover Commission’s parole and sentencing reforms: releasing selected low-risk non-violent offenders without parole; moving parolees off parole automatically after 12 clean months; providing community alternatives, not prison, for technical violations of parole; creating a sentencing commission that would recommend changes to penalties.

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the California Democratic Party, recognizing a disproportionate percentage of minorities is behind bars, supports implementation of these reforms to address overcrowding in prisons and jails.

Time to call your Democratic legislators in the state and tell them that their party has endorsed this resolution and that you would like them to support it as well.  Make sure you get an answer.  The Romero bill is in the Assembly right now, so that’s where your phone call will do the most good.  Please give our prisons a chance at success and make this state safer by calling now.

State Sen. Gloria Romero, a.k.a. the only one in Sacramento who gets the prison problem, is really sticking her neck out to deny the rapacious fearmongers more sentencing laws, and she deserves our support.

Republicans are outraged that more than two dozen bills in the Legislature that would create new crimes or lengthen sentences will languish until next year in a committee controlled by Democrats.

Sen. Gloria Romero, who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee, imposed a one-year moratorium earlier this year on all Senate and Assembly bills that would worsen crowding in California’s prisons and jails.

That’s what you do when there’s a CRISIS.  And considering that there have been nearly 1,000 laws in the past 30 years raising sentences for criminal offenders, I would guess that every additional law is completely unnecessary.  Of course, that’s the bread and butter for those so wedded to the “Tough on Crime” label.  So Republicans are miffed:

But Sen. Dave Cogdill, vice chairman of the committee, maintains the panel “shouldn’t be holding the safety of the people of California hostage to this situation.”

The Modesto Republican concedes prison crowding “is very real, but the reality is any bill that we take action on this year wouldn’t become law until January 2008.”

Right, because new prison facilities can be conjured in a matter of months.  Who’s the architect, Merlin?

over…

Romero, the chief force behind the bill to create an independent sentencing commission, is dead right on the optics of the whole prison crisis.

Romero noted the prisons’ medical system already is being run by a receivership established by the federal courts. And two federal judges have indicated they are leaning toward creating a judicial panel charged with setting a population cap for the entire system.

“We can try to look like we’re tough on crime, but how tough are we if at a certain point the receiver takes over the entire system?” she said, noting that 30 of the state’s 58 counties already have established population caps for their jails.

That’s all some of these legislators care about, looking tough while in actuality squandering our tenuous hold on the prison crisis, increasing recidivism rates, destroying rehabilitation and treatment, and making everyone in this state less safe.  It’s a simple-minded approach that neglects the very real issue of overcrowding.

Romero is really putting herself out there on this.  It may not be a popular position but it’s the right one.  And she should be applauded, as well as supported in her efforts to create a sentencing commission outside of the political sphere so that this “Tough on Crime” nonsense can be muted.