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.

Once again, a judge has invalidated parts of a “tough on crime” ballot initiative.  Earlier it was Jessica’s Law, Prop. 83, which was ruled partially unconstitutional.  Now Prop. 9, passed last year, has been found to have illegal provisions.

A key part of a victims’ rights measure voters approved in November was blocked Thursday by a federal judge, who ruled that the state cannot restrict parole violators’ right to state-provided legal counsel when considering whether to send them back to prison.

Senior Judge Lawrence K. Karlton of the U.S. District Court in Sacramento ruled against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state in issuing an injunction against part of Proposition 9, the measure known as the Victims’ Bill of Rights Act of 2008: Marsy’s Law.

The initiative dictates that the state provide legal counsel to parole violators only under certain circumstances, including when the case is unusually complex or when the parolee is indigent or has issues of mental competency.

The SacBee has more.  I don’t know how this could ever have even reached the ballot in the first place.  And this is part of our insane parole policy, which even before this law was failing the state.  67% of all inmates sent to prison in 2007 were parole violators, often for technical violations.  As I wrote then:

It is a financial and moral disaster that we are throwing men and women back in jail for parole violations at such an accelerated rate, far beyond any other state in the country.  This is clearly a factor of the state’s parole policy, which is too constrictive and too quick to return people to prison.  It surely leads to the high recidivism rate for those who commit crimes multiple times – if they feel they can’t escape the system once they’re in it, they simply have no incentive to rehabilitate themselves […]

We are diseased by the prison-industrial complex.  Prison construction is good for the CCPOA and supposedly good for the economy but it’s based on a flawed notion that all construction spending is valuable.  In fact, prison construction, especially of the type so needless that bringing parole policy in line with the other 49 states in the union would practically eliminate the overcrowding crisis and rendering the need for more beds moot, crowds out other, more valuable building projects that have a tangible value to people’s lives.  We are violating the human rights of inmates and the Constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishment, as well as stifling innovative public investment, because the parole officers have a powerful lobby and the Tough on Crime dementia has infested the minds of practically every legislator in the state for 30 years.

At the national level, we are finally seeing the seeds of a robust prison reform movement.  Jim Webb and Arlen Specter have submitted a bill to completely overhaul the criminal justice system.  The bill would commission a panel to review incarceration rates, sentencing policies, gang violence, prison administration and reintegration of offenders.  This sounds like a small step, but considering that absolutely nothing has been done to stop the train of “tough on crime” insanity from rolling down the track in decades, it’s significant.  A copy of the legislation is here.  Sen. Webb remarked:

“America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace,” said Senator Webb. “With five percent of the world’s population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence […]

“We are not protecting our citizens from the increasing danger of criminals who perpetrate violence and intimidation as a way of life, and we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail,” concluded Webb. “I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity.

The bill has 14 co-sponsors, neither or whom are named Boxer or Feinstein.  Tell them they should know better, with the prison crisis consuming more and more of the state budget and destroying the lives of nonviolent offenders.

Lost amidst the union-busting and efforts to destroy public schools in Arnold’s budget proposal is maybe the first serious, legitimate attempt to sensibly manage the prison crisis in decades, with a reform plan that would save the state $1 billion by boarding up the revolving door between jail and parole for nonviolent offenders.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest budget proposal would reduce by tens of thousands the number of criminals behind bars and under community supervision.

Parole would be eliminated for all nonserious, nonviolent and non-sex offenders. The proposal would cut the parole population by about 65,000 by June 30, 2010, or more than half of the Christmas Eve count of 123,144.

At the same time, the corrections plan calls for increasing good-time credits for inmates who obey the rules and complete rehabilitation programs. Combined with the new parole policies that would result in fewer violators forced back into custody, the proposal would reduce the prison population by 15,000 by June 30, 2010. It stood at 171,542 on Dec. 24.

It is insane and wrong, particularly during this budget meltdown but really in general, that 2/3 of all prisoners entering the system in 2007 were parole violators.  These are minor, possibly technical offenses with little bearing on public safety that clog up the jails, creating constitutional crises.  California is the worst state in the union when it comes to parole policy, and these changes would simply bring the state in line with the rest of the country, all of which are able to manage without a perpetual crime wave.

Now, it may anger tough on crime advocates, as well as those who have a self-interested stake like the prison guards, but I have to say that they are the right people to anger.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, still at odds with Schwarzenegger over a new contract, blasted the plan.

“What it means is residual costs to all citizens of California and higher insurance rates and more crime,” said CCPOA spokesman Lance Corcoran, whose union represents about 30,000 correctional officers and parole agents. “These are individuals who do not take advantage of opportunities for change, and they are not going to change,” he said of the offenders who stand to benefit from the proposals.

More scaremongering isn’t going to work.  There is no reason for tough on crime policies to continue to rule the day.  Those days are over.

The proposals on rehabilitation and time credits for prisoners, which would accrue in county lockups and get advanced if detainees take drug, vocational and educational programs, are already in the work-around budget passed by the Legislature.  Arnold could go ahead and sign that, and put us on a more responsible criminal justice path immediately.  

A remarkable little report appeared over the weekend, one that should have been on the desks of every member in the Legislature come Monday morning, but one which I suspect wasn’t.  In fact, I don’t think it even made any of the papers, relegated to a sidebar on CapAlert.

California has more men and women locked up in prison than any other state, a new federal report finds, and unlike any other state, the vast majority of those placed behind bars are parole violators.

The report bolsters contentions by critics of the much-overcrowded prison system that state parole officers, who belong to the same union as prison guards, are extraordinarily willing to slap a parole inmate back behind bars, thereby exacerbating a prison overcrowding problem […]

On average, the nation’s state and federal prisons took in almost two new offenders for every parole violator, but in California, the reverse is true. In 2007, California prisons took in 139,608 inmates and 92,628 of them were parole violators, almost a 2-1 ratio. In only one other state, Washington, did parole violators outnumber those being jailed by the courts, and that was only by 126 inmates.

Here’s the report from the Department of Justice.

It is a financial and moral disaster that we are throwing men and women back in jail for parole violations at such an accelerated rate, far beyond any other state in the country.  This is clearly a factor of the state’s parole policy, which is too constrictive and too quick to return people to prison.  It surely leads to the high recidivism rate for those who commit crimes multiple times – if they feel they can’t escape the system once they’re in it, they simply have no incentive to rehabilitate themselves.

Yet instead of reforming parole policy and getting some much-needed sanity into our sentencing laws, the bipartisan Tough on Crime machine squashes an independent sentencing commission and allows the passage of Prop. 9, which would implement an even MORE restrictive parole system, so much so that it violates the state constitution.

A federal judge has blocked enforcement of portions of a ballot measure approved last month by California voters that modify the state’s parole revocation system.

The so-called Victims’ Bill of Rights of 2008, passed on Nov. 4 as Proposition 9, amends the Penal Code to restrict or eliminate rights gained in a 14-year-old class action lawsuit in Sacramento federal court, parolees’ attorneys argue.

Parolees and the state agreed in March 2004 to a permanent injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton mandating an overhaul of parole revocation procedures and guaranteeing due process for ex-convicts accused of parole violations.

Ten days after the election, attorneys for the parolees filed a motion seeking to enforce the 2004 injunction, saying Proposition 9 “purports to eliminate nearly all due process rights of parolees and directly conflicts with the protections put in place by the injunction and established constitutional law.”

We are diseased by the prison-industrial complex.  Prison construction is good for the CCPOA and supposedly good for the economy but it’s based on a flawed notion that all construction spending is valuable.  In fact, prison construction, especially of the type so needless that bringing parole policy in line with the other 49 states in the union would practically eliminate the overcrowding crisis and rendering the need for more beds moot, crowds out other, more valuable building projects that have a tangible value to people’s lives.  We are violating the human rights of inmates and the Constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishment, as well as stifling innovative public investment, because the parole officers have a powerful lobby and the Tough on Crime dementia has infested the minds of practically every legislator in the state for 30 years.  

Fixing parole policy and putting up-front money into drug treatment and prevention programs would save the state billions.  It requires leadership.  That’s a limited resource right now in Sacramento.

Yesterday, every living governor in the state stood together at a news event to oppose Prop. 5.  The Yes on 5 campaign had exactly the right response – this shows what a bipartisan failure prison policy has been in California, and continues to be.  Arianna Huffington has a stellar post about this today.

Here is picture that sums up much that is wrong with American politics. Five governors of California, Democrats and Republicans, joining forces to oppose something that is indisputably in the public interest.

This is an image that could be repeated, with different faces, in region after region of our country, involving issue after issue. Public officials standing against the public good, with the disastrous results on display from Detroit to Wall Street. All suffering from the same destructive force: the power of entrenched special interests to cloud the vision of our leaders, causing them to thwart good sense, good legislation, and the will of the people

Huffington rightly points out the horrific state of California prisons.

California’s prisons are a budget-busting debacle. There are currently more than 170,000 inmates crammed into prisons designed to hold 100,000 people. Around 70,000 of these prisoners are nonviolent offenders, with over half of them incarcerated for a drug offense.

A large part of the problem is a parole system the New York Times recently called “perhaps the most counterproductive and ill-conceived” in the U.S.. California’s recidivism rate is 70 percent — twice the national average. This stems in no small measure from the state’s insistence on treating paroled murderers the same way as paroled nonviolent drug offenders. They all spend 3-5 years on parole. This overburdens parole officers, who end up spending very little time with any of their charges — violent or nonviolent (According to the Times, 80 percent of California parolees have fewer than two 15-minute meetings with their parole officer per month.) Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep a closer watch on rapists and killers than on nonviolent drug offenders?

As a result of this dysfunctional system, prison costs have risen 50 percent since 2000, to over $10 billion a year — close to 10% of the state’s budget (and roughly the same amount California spends on higher education). It costs $46,000 a year to keep a nonviolent prisoner in the state behind bars. Is it any wonder California is gushing red ink?

And as bad as this sounds, she leaves something out.  The health care system is so substandard that California is systematically violating the Constitutional rights of everyone it incarcerates, subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment.  And even after they have been forced by court orders to remedy the situation, the state has refused to do so, setting up a showdown and a possible contempt-of-court order against the Governor himself.  This is how big the failure of leadership is on our prisons.  The only thing politicians can agree on is that we must keep scaring the citizenry into warehousing prisoners over and over, without trying to actually treat and rehabilitate them.

Huffington then describes Prop. 5.

Prop 5 is structured to build on the proven success of Prop 36, a law promoting drug treatment over incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders. It was approved by 61 percent of California voters in 2000, despite almost unanimous opposition from public officials. Since being enacted, Prop 36 has saved California taxpayers $2 billion — and graduated 84,000 people who, according to studies, are far less likely to become repeat offenders […]

Yet Prop 5 is struggling because of a very powerful special interest: the prison guards union. It has funneled $1.8 million into the campaign to derail Prop 5.

For the guards, prison overcrowding means more overtime pay. So the state’s prison industrial complex has unleashed the full force of its financial power — funding an array of ads that blatantly mischaracterize Prop 5. Truth has gone out the window, replaced by overheated claims that the initiative is a “drug dealer’s bill of rights,” “a get out of jail free card” for meth dealers, and a law that will allow parents to abuse their kids and escape punishment.

Goodbye reform, hello fear. The special interests are, once again, overwhelming the public interest.

The prison guards are powerful enough that everyone who might want to be Governor – Jerry Brown, DiFi – would rather break with the stated position of the Democratic Party than defy them.  And so these tough on crime Democrats want to jump back into the rabbit hole and further the absolute and utter failure – maybe the biggest failure in the state, demonstrably so – to stay on the good side of a union who can lavish them with campaign contributions.  It’s utterly disgusting and shameful.