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.

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.

Welcome to a probably not-so-regular feature, offering the latest news on the ballot propositions.  The Calitics Editorial Board will be out with their endorsements on these initiatives sometime next week.

• Prop. 1A: A lot of good stuff on this race at Robert Cruickshank’s California High Speed Rail blog.  For instance, Arnold has come forward with his support:

There is far more economic opportunity in fighting global warming than economic risk….We shouldn’t let the budget crisis hold back good things for the future. 20 years from now you can’t look back and say “well they had a budget crisis so we didn’t do it.” Just because we had a problem with the budget does not mean that people should vote “no” on high speed rail. Our rail system in America is so old, we’re driving the same speed as 100 years ago, the same system as 100 years ago. We should modernize, we should do what other countries do…We should start in this state, we should show leadership.

Absolutely, especially when you consider that initiatives which reduce emissions routinely save money and improve quality of life.  A recent study showed that HSR would be a tremendous economic benefit to the Central Valley, with $3 billion in direct benefits and the creation of over 40,000 new construction jobs.  You can add that to the reduction of billions of pounds of CO2 annually, which would be significant in that region at a time where interest groups are successfully suing the city of Fresno for its failure to curb pollution and protect the environment.

In other news, The LA Times has come out in favor, and check out this neat little graphic anticipating the train route.

• Prop. 2: You can see it by clicking on the ad on the side, but, you know, Piggy Wonder deserves some main-page love.  Joe Trippi is apparently involved in the Prop. 2 campaign, which would help stop animal cruelty; I got an email from him promoting this video.

• Prop. 5: The LA Times has a series of profiles on all the propositions, and here’s their edition on Prop. 5, which would finally increase treatment for nonviolent offenders like drug users instead of warehousing them at our overstuffed prisons.  Opponents are smearing this by saying its true intent is to legalize drugs, but the failed Drug War is the great unmentionable sinkhole in state and national budgets, and a smart policy emphasizing rehabilitation is desperately needed, especially in California.  The No on 5 people must have better spinmeisters, however, as most of the newspapers in the state have come out against the measure.  Right, because the policymakers have done such a stellar job in sentencing law, we should just leave it to them.

• Prop. 8: An update on those million yard signs that were “in route” from China to the Yes on 8 campaign: they’re still not here.

It seems that the signs, some of them outsourced overseas, didn’t all arrive in time for the September event. And many still haven’t reached supporters of the measure that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.

“It takes longer to get a million than we thought,” said Sonja Eddings Brown, deputy communications director for the Protect Marriage coalition […]

Brown tried to spin the production glitch as a positive thing for the campaign — a sign, so to speak, of the overwhelming demand for lawn signs by voters who wanted to participate in “the most unprecedented and largest grass-roots effort ever attempted in California.”

Oh that’s just a FAIL.

Meanwhile, when the most reactionary editorial board in the state, the Orange County Register, comes out against your proposition, you know you’re having a tough time selling it.  As for the right-wing boycott of Google for opposing Prop. 8, the website orchestrating it advises its supporters to follow the fate of the proposition – on Google News.

I think I’m going to miss this initiative, it’s been hilarious so far.

Last night on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA?, which everyone should be podcasting, Dan Walters from the Sacramento Bee made a very interesting point about the budget that has been somewhat unremarked-upon to this point.  I’m not generally a fan of Walters, but it’s hard to argue with this.

The budget that passed the Assembly took $1.2 billion designed to go to transit and put it back into the general fund, with the reason given that the infrastructure bonds are financing transit improvements so there would be some duplication there.  That’s not what voters approved in November at all.  Not even close.  The infrastructure bonds on transportation were meant to be additional funds that the state could use to start new projects.  It was in no way meant to stand in for the regular finances received from the state regarding transportation.

So we now have a situation where bonds have been floated to finance existing projects and maintenance.  Is this a preview of things to come, a get-out-of-the-deficit-free card by using Arthur Andersen-style creative accounting tactics?  Voters approved those bonds because they wanted to see new mass transit options and new carpool lanes.  They did not approve an addendum to the state budget to solve the fiscal mess.

(We of course see this also in the cut to Prop. 36 funding for drug treatment in prisons, also approved by voters, which I guess doesn’t matter.  It’s a good thing nobody covers this state in the media, or there would be some howling going on)

The Royal and Ancient Hermetic Order of the Shrill has a new member, and he’s particularly amped up about some of the little goodies tucked away in the state budget, which is once again too heavily constructed on the backs of the poor:

Anyway, it was about the time of the wine-tasting that the legislative leaders hatched their plan to roll California’s most vulnerable.OK, maybe I’m guilty of a cheap shot. But it’s no more a cheap shot than picking the pockets of the poor in order to bring spending and taxes closer into balance.

The victims list includes 1.2 million impoverished aged, blind and disabled, plus 500,000 welfare families, mostly single moms with two kids.

Skelton is particularly shrill about the delay in the cost of living adjustment (COLA) for seniors on state and federal assistance, and the cuts to public transit, which for many who can’t afford cars is the only recourse to get around (although we need to sever that link between class and public transit, and soon).  Skelton is particularly disappointed in some so-called progressive leaders:

It was a sign of scandalized Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s loss of political clout that he didn’t personally fight for the transit funds, as he has for other L.A. causes in the past. “He has been AWOL,” says one leading Democrat. “He’s been wounded.”

Democrats, however, haven’t exactly been fighting for the aged, poor and disabled either. Republicans wouldn’t be expected to. But Democrats are supposed to be the defenders of the destitute. Instead, they suddenly surrendered to Republicans last week after vowing to hold their ground.

Any budget is going to be a mixed bag under the 2/3 requirement.  But it does appear to me that winners and losers were very clearly chosen based on their political clout.  The blind, the elderly, the poor, they all don’t donate to campaigns the way that teachers do (no slam on teachers, just reality).  Drug offenders who saw a cut in Prop. 36 treatment funds don’t host fundraisers at the halfway house.  Where you stood in this budget depended upon where you sat, and if you didn’t have a place at the table, forget it.

Maybe that has to do with the donations rolling in for the term limits initiative.  Or maybe it’s just easier to dismiss those who have little voice and little chance to mobilize.