Spurred by a series of court decisions ruling the state’s prison crowding unconstitutional, Gov. Jerry Brown’s ongoing “realignment” effort sought to make adequate room for the state’s worst convicts by diverting lesser criminals to county jails. There, however, the changes have caused a snowball effect. A recent Los Angeles Times investigation has shown that newly encumbered counties turned to early release to lighten their own load — sending serious offenders back out on the streets with only a fraction of time served.

Analyzing jail data, the Times discovered that “incarceration in some counties has been curtailed or virtually eliminated for a variety of misdemeanors, including parole violations, domestic violence, child abuse, drug use and driving under the influence.” In Los Angeles County, where one in four jailed Californians are found, 10 percent of time served was “often” enough to release male inmates back into society, compared to just 5 percent for female inmates.

With a prison system as complex and bureaucratic as California’s, the perils of early release have proven to be just the tip of the iceberg of unintended consequences. In recent months, for instance, even parole violators have wound up in county, not state, jails. Los Angeles County has had to add 500 staffers to cope with the new flood of probationers, while Riverside County alone has added over 140.

The cumulative effect has been a so-called “revolving door” in the jail system, with the line blurring between the incarcerated and the law-abiding public. Dangerous inmates have left jail prematurely, only to return on fresh charges; even parolees who didn’t revisit jail on parole violations have remained part of the administrative system, which has incorporated automated kiosks to help supervise released cons.

According to the Times investigation, the sheer numbers of Californians involved have raised profound doubts about how long the current improvised system can go on. In 2011, California averaged 9,700 released inmates per month. Now, that number has reached 13,500 a month, with more than 17,400 hitting the streets in October alone.

Realigning cash

State and county officials said it’s an open secret that legislators knew about realignment’s consequences. That made it easy for localities to hit up Sacramento for a quick infusion of substantial funds — $850 million last fiscal year and over $1 billion this time around, according to state corrections department spokesman Luis Patino.

The flood of money following the flood of inmates has created incentives for an even larger state-funded prison system. Although realignment has reduced the state prison population, it has kickstarted a process where California pays for a county-level system that grows to compensate. Some $80 million in state dollars were recently awarded to Stanislaus County for a big new jail expansion — the first project drawing from Phase II of the $1.2 billion allocated by Assembly Bill 900, the Public Safety and Offender Rehabilitation Services Act of 2007.

Although an additional $44 million has flowed to a “re-entry facility” meant to help inmates with less than a year left in their sentence return to society, even left-leaning criminal justice critics have objected to the heavy costs associated with realignment. Vonya Quarles, an organizer with the All of Us or None organization, told the Modesto Bee that the Stanislaus project “is good for jobs and the builders, but the outcome of jail expansion has been nothing but failure,” underscoring the over $50,000 cost to keep an inmate in county jail for a year.

Measuring impact

In an effort to quantify the impact on crime caused by realignment, the Sentencing Project recently released the results of an investigation covering the 2006-2012 period. The study claimed that violent crime decreased by 21 percent, even while the prison population fell by 23 percent.

While proponents of realignment may be relieved to see such statistics, critics would likely point out that the six-year span of the study does not include the current spike in violent offenders released early.

By JOHN SEILER

One thing I’d like to know is how many millions of our tax dollars the government spent to convict beautiful actress Lindsay Lohan of petty theft. You know they spent that much because the government didn’t want an O.J. Simpson situation in which they lose a high-profile case involving a celebrity.

Lindsay was sentenced yesterday. In a sensible system, she would only have to give back the stolen goods, which she already did, and pay the aggrieved party some compensation. Instead, here’s what she got, as reported by the L.A. Times:

* “three years’  probation. Any violations could land her in jail.” This is just slavery.

* “Lohan has applied to be part of a home electronic monitoring program. That will be decided June 17, when she is scheduled to surrender to authorities.” This is a high-tech version of putting a ball-and-chain on you.

The only reason she might not be sent to the slammer is because of jail overcrowding and shrinking state and local budgets. So we can thank California’s effective bankruptcy for keeping a pretty petty thief from being locked up in one of the state’s hellacious jails.

The United States incarcerates more people than any country on earth — nearly 1 percent of the whole population is behind bars. Its “justice” system gives long sentences to petty thieves and minor drug users. And taxpayers, of course, foot the bill.

This nonsense started about 40 years ago, after the crime wave of the 1960s. Typically, things were taken too far. As the L.A. Times noted in another article…

the number of inmates grew from 76,000 in 1988 to nearly 170,000 today.

The number of incarcerated Californians had surged in the two previous decades, as voters and lawmakers approved tough-on-crime measures such as the “three-strikes” law. The costs of state prisons has soared as well, doubling since 2000.

Robbing Taxpayers

Obviously, we want violent offenders locked up. But almost everybody else should be dealt with in other ways. About $8 billion a year goes to California’s prisons, 10 percent of the state budget. It costs about $133 a day to house one prisoner — in prisons with brutal conditions.

The real victims here are taxpayers robbed by government.

The reason is the police-prosectuors-guards complex of power that scares people into providing massive pay, perks and pensions to the “law enforcement community.” And more people incarcerated means more “product” for their sick business. Not surprisingly, the prison guards’ and police officers’ unions are among the most powerful in the state.

It’s like in the Soviet Union of Stalin’s day. When the government need slave labor to build a canal or some other labor-intensive project, the  NKVD/KGB would round up hundreds of thousands of people on false charges and ship them to the slave labor camps of the Gulag.

In the case of Linsday Lohan, she’s a high-profile “example” made to show the rest of us that “even the rich must follow the law” — meaning, obey the dictates of the government.

Another high-profile case was Martha Stewart, who was framed by the government and sent to prison. William L. Anderson and Candice E. Jackson wrote about what happened at the time of Martha’s prosecution. They described the federal “justice” system. But their analysis applies also to state and local systems, which have been subsumed into the federal system. They wrote:

We hold that the federal criminal system that convicted her is an abomination to justice and is the destroyer of those precious “Rights of Englishmen” that this nation inherited from Great Britain (and especially the famed jurist William Blackstone) more than two centuries ago. What exists today in the federal courts is nothing less than a shadow justice system, an evil twin of the common law that served us so well for so long, a system that keeps the trappings of common law, but is more like Stalin’s Soviet Union than Blackstone’s England.

Born of political expediency and of the Progressive Era of the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies, the federal criminal system is nothing less than a mechanism that permits prosecutors to do an end run around the Constitutional protections that the framers of that document believed were the natural rights of individuals. While we know that many readers will disagree with the following statement, we hold that it is true and will demonstrate why we believe such a thing: modern federal criminal laws and policies hold much more in common with Josef Stalin’s U.S.S.R. in the 1930s than it does the Constitution of the United States….

While we have linked this page before, we remind readers of the powerful 10-part 1998 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series on federal prosecutorial misconduct written by Bill Moushey. One of us spoke on the telephone recently to one of the prosecutors named in the series (who allegedly tried to frame one of his targets), and it was clear from our conversation that he believed he could do what he wanted, when he wanted, and that he was above the law. (Jurors complained that they thought Stewart to be “arrogant.” This prosecutor’s arrogance made Stewart’s alleged haughtiness look like the demeanor a humble peasant.)….

In the end, we see a shadow set of laws that are written not to protect anyone, but only to improve the probability of prosecutors gaining convictions. William Blackstone, who coined the term “Rights of Englishmen,” declared that the law was to be a “shield” to protect the innocent and to put firm boundaries around the workings of government agents.
Blackstone’s shield in the federal system now is a weapon that the state uses against everyone else. The “Rights of Englishmen” are now dead. The federal courts have the looks and trappings of that once-magnificent system of laws that was part and parcel to the very meaning of the United States of America. But while it may seem that the modern system is a continuation of that system we inherited from Great Britain, the system inside is rotten. It does not protect citizens from the state; instead, it gives the state all of the weapons (federal prosecutors like to call them “tools”) it needs to declare everyone a criminal.

Lohan Making Nice

Lindsay now is making nice to the system that has tormented her. In the place of her previous refreshing insolence toward the “justice” system, she said in a statement:

I am glad to be able to put this past me and move on with my life and my career. I support the judge’s decision and hold myself accountable for being in this situation.

I have already started my community service at the Downtown Women’s Center and thank everyone there for their warm welcome. I hope to be able to fulfill my obligation without any press attention. I think the media spotlight should be on issues such as homelessness and domestic violence instead of on me.

That’s understandable. But I hope that, when Lindsay finally gets the Soviet-style “justice” system off her back in about three years, she’ll become a force for restoring Americans’ rights and liberties. She has felt first hand the iron fist of tyranny smashing down on her.

Free Lindsay Lohan!

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Apparently California Gov. Jerry Brown and his staff follow Calwatchdog.com, but not necessarily the will of the people of California.

Gov. Brown issued a curious statement at a press conference held Wednesday in Sacramento to pitch his tax plan that the “ultimate authority rests with the people” when it comes to taxes.

Brown’s statement about the necessity of the sovereignty of the people for raising taxes was made wioth prominent law-enforcement officials present to give seeming legitimacy to his tax plan. Brown says that a tax increase is needed to incarcerate dangerous criminals.

The above statement about the sovereignty of the people perhaps is in response to charges made, including in an article posted yesterday on this website, that Brown is trying to undo the will of the people who voted across the board at the Nov. 2010 statewide election that they didn’t want taxes raised.

Brown raised the issue of a “legitimacy crisis” to his “regime” back on Sunday at a press conference held in Los Angeles and dangerously insinuated that if his plan were not passed that Civil War would be inevitable.

On Sunday, Brown inferred that a Civil War was inevitable. On Wednesday, he threatened to release dangerous criminals back into local communities if taxes are not raised. For all his talk about following the “consent of the governed” on taxes, Brown has resorted to symbolic scare tactics to intimidate the public to undo their message of “no more taxes.”

It is clear that Brown does not want to follow the “will of the people,” but wants to scare them into voting for a tax increase for a high-balanced state budget.  This short-term “fix” to the state budget will do nothing to resolve the huge pension tsunami that will hit state and local governments in 2012 and thereafter.

Fewer Prisoners

Brown failed to mention that the prison population has already been reduced from about 172,000 to 152,000, starting back in 2008 up to today. Brown also omitted any discussion that the $7.7 billion in prison building bonds authorized under AB 900 and signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger back in 2007 has yet to result in a single new local jail being built or an old prison re-opened.

The State Legislature, with a unanimous 70-0 vote, initially passed AB 900. So not only does Brown not want to comply with the will of the electorate, but he hasn’t said how he would comply with the will of the legislature either.

A crucial part of Brown’s purported tax plan is to divert prisoners from expensive state prisons where it costs $44,500 per year to house a prisoner to county jails that can cost half that.  But Brown has shown no interest in fast-tracking local jail construction or suspending the California Environmental Quality Act to get jails built. This leaves litigious environmentalists with a trump card over the sovereign will of the people who don’t want any more taxes.

Political rhetoric to the contrary, Gov. Brown and his Party of Government are squandering their opportunity at gaining legitimacy by continuing to defy the will of the people expressed at the ballot box last year.  If Brown should be able to put his tax plan to the voters and they reject it yet again, then what will he and his Party do?  Will they run to the courts? Or will they foment an insurrection? Or release a flood of prisoners on our doorsteps to undo democracy?

That is apparently what Brown is threatening. Let’s call it democracy by intimidation dressed up with the euphemistic term of “nudging the sovereign people.”