This should come as no surprise to Calitics readers, who have been treated to a steady diet of articles on the flaws with our prison system. In a system with too many prisoners and too few funds to properly accommodate them and their legal processes, those combined factors mean that the death penalty system is on the verge of collapse, according to a state commission report released today:

The commission did not advocate abolishing the death penalty but did note that California could save $100 million a year if the state replaced the punishment with sentences of life in prison without possibility of parole. Death row prisoners cost more to confine, are granted more resources for appeals, have more expensive trials and usually die in prison anyway, the commission said in its 117-page report….

Among the panel’s findings:

* Seventy-nine death row inmates have not obtained lawyers to handle their first appeals, which are by law automatic, and 291 inmates lack lawyers to bring constitutional challenges based on facts that the trial courts did not hear. It takes inmates an average of 12 years to obtain a state high court ruling on their first appeals.

* The California Supreme Court has such a backlog that only one appeal from a conviction after 1997 has been resolved.

* California does not meet the federal standard for paying private lawyers to handle death cases, and the state’s method of paying these attorneys — sometimes with flat-fee contracts — violates American Bar Assn. standards.

The problems facing the state’s administration of the death penalty stem from the same causes as the broader prisons crisis. California voters and politicians embraced “tough on crime” policies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s but neglected to properly fund the system, which has grown like a cancer on our budget. It’s never difficult for politicians to propose new crimes or higher sentences, but these same legislators – like the Runners – also work to cut the state’s taxing ability, putting California on a collision course with both the federal courts and common sense. Either we fund the system properly, or pursue saner correctional policies.

The report’s authors did not agree on solutions. Natasha Minsker, head of death penalty policy for the ACLU of Northern California, argues that since there’s no money to improve the system, we should turn to life imprisonment instead of putting so many people on death row:

Considering California’s fiscal crisis, spending all of this money is not only unlikely, it’s impossible….

Few people realize that condemning someone to permanent imprisonment costs California taxpayers millions of dollars less than sentencing him or her to death. We have had the option of permanent imprisonment for as long as we have had the death penalty, and it’s proven itself to be a more functional system that serves as a severe, but cost effective, punishment.

Which brings us to our third option, according to the Commission: replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment until death, and save millions of dollars for public safety programs that actually work to punish criminals, protect the public and help victims. This would cost us less than $12 million, a savings of more than $200 million a year over option one.

The report itself notes that most death row inmates die before they can be executed anyway, rendering the whole process somewhat pointless. Combined with the racial biases that Minsker describes in her article but that the report did not closely examine, and the fiscal issues involved, it seems sensible from a public policy standpoint to eliminate the death penalty and embrace the life imprisonment option.

It’s clear that California’s correctional policies are totally unsustainable. But with a broken political system and a lack of leadership from either party on fixing it, it seems unlikely we’re going to get any real solutions anytime soon.