Sellout on CA Prison Reform

The State Legislature decided to run away from hard choices and add brick and mortar to simply delay our prison crisis without addressing root causes.

Legislative leaders brokered a deal Wednesday to add 53,000 beds to the state's prison and jail systems while increasing rehabilitation opportunities for inmates with added drug treatment, vocational and education programs.

The $7.4 billion agreement to help ease California's severe prison overcrowding contained no provisions for any early releases of inmates.

At the same time, it did not include any changes to the state's parole or sentencing systems. And it drew heavy criticism from the prison system's two largest public employee unions over a provision that would allow the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to transfer 8,000 inmates out of state in a program now on hold in the appellate courts.

The transferring 8,000 inmates part won't get through the courts. And holding firm on sentencing and parole is lunacy, absolute lunacy. It just means that we'll all be back here in 5 years. Meanwhile construction money will be doled out and more nonviolent offenders will be locked up. And the "increasing rehabilitation opportunities"? Lip service.

What does the proposal by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Senate leader Don Perata, Assembly GOP leader Mike Villines and Senate GOP leader Dick Ackerman say about rehabilitation?

According to some prison advocates, not much. In addition to $7.4 billion in spending to build new jails and prisons, it would allocate just $50 million in the first year on substance abuse, education and mental health services. The system currently has about 170,000 prisoners, and a recidivism rate close to 70%.

That's a crime. This state government won't even fully fund Prop. 36, passed by voters to move drug offenders into treatment centers and not prisons. We have 94 year-old men in walkers who have been rejected for parole six times. And now there's a prison "solution" that is notable only for its cowardice, its refusal to address sentencing guidelines and its big talk on rehabilitation without action. More beds is not the answer; it's embarrassingly obvious.
A couple good Democrats had some sense, but were not backed up by their leaders:

While Republican lawmakers hailed the agreement, enthusiasm was more muted among Democratic lawmakers, many of whom declined to comment. Two sources familiar with a meeting Wednesday evening among Senate Democrats said that state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a leading advocate in the Legislature of prison reform, had criticized the plan at the meeting.

State Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, noted the deal "will mark more growth for the prison industry."

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said policymakers had no choice but to increase the size of the prison system.

"This is a compromise among bad alternatives," Perata said. "Now we vote and light candles. That's a reference to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes."

Are you kidding me? Apparently the Democrats aren't in the majority in Sacramento. I don't know if you were aware of that. But that's what Perata is telling me by this statement.

It's scandalous. The political will to actually fix the prison crisis is nonexistent. This capitulation to try to build our way out of it is fated not to work. I'm disgusted by this absolute spinelessness.