On reconsideration, bill moves out of Senate.

by Brian Leubitz

When the bill failed on its first time up, Mark Leno said he would bring his SB1439 back for reconsideration. And this time the Senate Leadership, much to their credit, rallied around the bill and pushed it forward. Senators Darrell Steinberg and Kevin de León really got behind it, and pushed previous ‘No’ votes to yes.

The vote went from 18-19 to 21-14, with Sens. Hill, Hernandez and Hueso switching their votes. However, there were a lot of caveats to get those votes, and they probably wouldn’t have switched their votes had this been the final vote. There were a couple key compromises that have been discussed, but there are a lot of details to be hashed out.

The yet-to-be-written amendments would exempt one or two small properties owned by “mom-and-pop” landlords from new Ellis Act restrictions and may also include a sunset date for the bill. (SF Gate / Melody Gutierrez)

The third amendment adds on to the first, namely restrictions on what a “mom-and-pop” landlord really is. Just because an LLC owns only one building, does not a small landlord make. Whether the amended bill will be worth supporting is still very dependent on how that small landlord exception is defined and how long it will be until the bill sunsets.

Kudos to Sen. Leno and his colleagues for moving the ball forward on a measure that nearly the entire San Francisco elected leadership supports.

Court is putting finger on the scales toward a settlement

by Brian Leubitz

The Court has been pretty upfront with their displeasure with the progress on prison population reduction. But perhaps they are also less than thrilled with the simple private prisons option and see a ray of light with the proposals that the Senate Democrats brought to the issue.  Either way, the Court granted the state four weeks, moving the date back from the end of the year until Jan 27, 2014. (PDF of the order). Here’s the important part for that delay:

The December 31, 2013 deadline shall be extended until January 27, 2014, without prejudice to the parties’ filing a joint request for a further extension or the Court so ordering. During the meet-and-confer process and until further order of the Court, defendants shall not enter into any contracts or other arrangements to lease additional capacity in out-of-state facilities or otherwise increase the number of inmates who are housed in out-of-state facilities.

Now, four weeks, you are thinking? Well, the judges have a plan for those four weeks. As mentioned in that last paragraph (actually the third of three paragraphs in the order), the state and the plaintiffs in the case were ordered to a negotiation process overseen by First District Court of Appeal Justice Peter Siggins. Justice Siggins will then notify the Three Judge Panel on Oct 21 whether there is hope for a settlement. Specifically, he was tasked with looking at a number of options to reducing populations, which apparently the Court finds preferable to the leasing additional capacity.

The meet-and-confer process shall explore how defendants can comply with this Court’s June 20, 2013 Order, including means and dates by which such compliance can be expedited or accomplished and how this Court can ensure a durable solution to the prison crowding problem.  The discussions shall specifically include: (a) three strikers; (b) juveniles; (c) the elderly and the medically infirm; (d) Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisoners; (e) the implementation of the Low Risk List; and (f) any other means, including relocation within the state, that are included in defendants’ May 2, 2013 List.  Justice Siggins and the parties may also discuss any necessary or desirable extension of the December 31, 2013 deadline beyond that provided for in the final paragraph of this order, as well as any other matters they deem appropriate.

These criteria are remarkably similar to a letter written by the ACLU to the Governor on how we could release prisoners without leasing additional capacity. So clearly the court is looking for an option beyond the Governor’s plan, and appreciates the dialog that the Legislature had with the Senate’s plan. Of course, at the heart of the Senate Democrats plan was a three year delay brought about by a settlement with the plaintiffs.

This is a lot of reading of tea leaves out of a three paragraph order. But if some progress can be made over the next four weeks, maybe we can spend a little more time reforming the heart of the troubling system as the Senate Democrats hoped to do.

Three Judge Panel Grants 4 Week Delay

Brown’s plan basically holds, with hope held out for greater reform

by Brian Leubitz

With time running out on funding and planning prison transfers, Sen. Steinberg has compromised to something appearing very similar to Gov. Brown’s original plan:

A modified version of Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison housing plan appears headed for approval after Brown and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, the plan’s chief critic, announced today they reached a compromise.

The state will proceed with Brown’s plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce California’s prison population by moving thousands of inmates to local lockups and out of state, but only if federal judges overseeing California’s prison overcrowding case do not give the state more time to address overcrowding.(Sac Bee)

That “but only if” is the compromise that Steinberg was able to get from the Governor. It also represents the great hope of his own plan that perhaps the court would grant the state additional time to deal with the overcrowding and get back to 137.5% of capacity. That delay is still quite speculative at this time. If it is ultimately denied, this plan looks pretty close to what Gov. Brown offered up originally. If there is a delay, perhaps we can really work on some of those needed reforms.

I will be on KPFK’s Uprising tomorrow at 8:20 to discuss the prison mess, as the legislative session draws to a close with no clear plans to comply with the court order.

by Brian Leubitz

Right now, the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee is holding a hearing on the prison proposals. Suffice it to say there is a lot of political posturing going on right now. You can watch now on the CalChannel.

The committee will hear testimony on AB 84, the Senate Democrats’ Safe, Sustainable and Fiscally Responsible Plan to Reduce Crime and Settle the Prison Overcrowding Crisis. The plan, which avoids any early releases of inmates, offers settlement of a federal court order to reduce California’s prison population by approximately 9,600 inmates by December 31, 2013. The committee will also review the Governor’s proposal – which is in included in SB 105 in the Assembly – which relies solely on temporary expanded prison capacity. More details of the plan are available in this post.

However, here are a few numbers from a recent David Binder poll that should probably factor into the decision:

These goals are the heart of the Senate plan, and they are nothing but laudable. However, as the Governor and supporters of his plan are quick to point out, the Senate plan requires a quick settlement with the plaintiffs as well as approval from the courts for a three year delay. And that’s where you get much of the tussling in today’s hearing.

There is no question that our prisons are overcrowded. We are locking up unheard of percentages of our population, and not coming up with any good solutions on how to reduce these numbers. Perhaps the Senate’s plan is a bit of wishful thinking, but our previous attempts have been simplistic and led directly to our current crisis.

But hey, on the bright side, the prisons are going to allow same sex marriages. So, that’s something…

Plan calls for settlement with prison plaintiffs, sentencing reform

by Brian Leubitz

As I mentioned yesterday, the prisons are a mess. However, things can get worse. My friend, and SF School Board member, Matt Haney co-authored an op-ed in the SF Chronicle with Van Jones about the governor’s position on the issue:

Gov. Jerry Brown confirmed this week that he is pulling his prison policies out of a 1980s playbook. It is heartbreaking to watch our nation’s most famous Democratic governor cling to outdated, lock ’em up notions that even conservatives are abandoning in droves. …

Tuesday, he made his most shocking step yet by proposing to send inmates to for-profit prisons. This boondoggle will cost an additional $315 million and more than $1 billion over three years to house thousands of people in private prisons leased by the state. Even our most extreme, fear-mongering politicians of decades past would have been reluctant to put forward such a scheme.

Brown appears hell bent on being on the wrong side of history. Across the political spectrum, leaders are beginning to understand that we need to invest in rehabilitation, re-entry programs, and evidence-based alternatives, rather than continuing our failed policies of mass incarceration. (Matt Haney and Van Jones / SF Chronicle)

So, while the Governor is working hard to come to some sort of immediate solution, there is not much optimism for a progressive in the plan. Meanwhile, Sen. Steinberg has a plan, but it relies on one very crucial assumption: he can get the plaintiffs in the suit to settle and have the judges agree to a three year delay on implementation.  As I mentioned yesterday, it is a big risk and not entirely clear how the judges would rule even with a settlement.

But there is reason to believe that a settlement would be possible. And perhaps Gov. Brown is playing a game to force the plaintiffs hand in some really tricky three dimensional chess strategy. Brown’s plan is pretty much everything the plaintiffs don’t want. Under all this, they would like to see some sentencing and other reforms in the prison system. The governor’s plan pretty much goes in the entirely opposite direction. It is also worthwhile to note that the ACLU crunched some numbers to show that the state could meet the court order only using the techniques Brown has previously supported.

Now here is where Steinberg comes in. If he can get the plaintiffs to settle, and the court agrees to a delay, perhaps we have created the real opportunity that we need to follow the lead of other states like Kansas (!) that have already done much to decrease the mass incarcerations that have been building in our country over the past fifty years. In fact, the ACLU has a very interesting report on the subject. While three years may not be the time frame everybody would ideally target, it is realistic. And maybe Steinberg’s plan is a good start on how we get there.

Now, as for that plan, you can see an outline here or over the flip. It is far from perfect. It calls for an advisory commission to review our public safety system, but doesn’t really provide the specifics of how we really get to the important reductions we need in our prison system. However, maybe that lack of specificity is for the best now. Maybe it could set up the conditions of real reform that we need. But if we don’t meet that court order, we’ll be back to square one in three years. And maybe those three years could make a big difference.

Durable Solutions – Senate Democratic Caucus – Aug2813

Legislature Agrees to Deal with Governor, Set to Pass Soon

by Brian Leubitz

It turns out representative democracy works. It really works! When you let the majority party do its job, they tend to get it done. It doesn’t hurt that the Governor is of the same party as well, of course. However, in the end, the Governor got most of what he wanted, this is primarily a budget with limited restorations of persistent funding. And he mostly got his way on school funding as well. From John Myers:

The proposal, which still must be put into actual bill form by week’s end, gives legislative Democrats from both houses a smattering of their priorities, from money for mental health programs to new dollars for career technical education and a new scholarship program aimed at college students from middle-class families.

For the governor, the budget includes most of what he wanted in a major education funding plan to earmark money for disadvantaged students.  The proposal tinkers with, but retains the structure, of the formulas first demanded by Brown in January — including extra cash for school districts with higher concentrations of poor and English learner students. (John Myers / News10)

There are still plenty of smaller details to work out, but the budget is looking like it will be passed on time for a third straight year. It is no coincidence that it has been three years since the majority vote ballot measure was passed.

On the other hand, this budget is far from all that could be desired from a progressive standpoint. There are big holes that should be filled sooner rather than later. We are still leaving some of our most vulnerable Californians without the services that they desperately need. We are still underfunding the supposedly co-equal judicial branch. We are still underfuning health care services.

The budget uses Brown’s more conservative estimates of revenue over the LAO’s estimates of $3B extra, but perhaps that caution could lead to a more sustainable future for state services.