Nearly 10,000 inmates could leave California prisons within four years, another consequence of the state’s long struggle with the judicial system over the way it incarcerates convicts. 

“As the state prison population comes close to exceeding a court-mandated limit, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is pursuing new regulations that aim to get more inmates paroled more quickly over time,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “The proposed rules, originating from voter approval of Proposition 57 in November and unveiled [March 24], would allow ‘nonviolent’ felons to first seek parole at the conclusion of the base term for their primary offense, before serving additional time for other charges and enhancements that can add years to their sentence.”

A vote’s consequences

Through Prop. 57, new regulations were slated to come into effect instituting a credit system for inmates hoping to reduce their sentences. “The main regulation is the credit earning system, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” KXTV noted. “For milestone completion credits, an inmate can earn them when they complete a specific education or career training program that’s also attached to attendance and performance requirements. Prop. 57 increases the amount of time an inmate can earn for these types of credits from six to 12 weeks per year.”

“Rehabilitative Achievement Credits are where inmates can participate in approved self-help groups or other activities promoting the rehabilitating or positive behavioral changes in an inmate. Inmates are able to earn up to four weeks of these credits annually. The last are Educational Merit Credits where inmates who successfully complete and achieve a GED, high school diploma, college degree or alcohol and drug counseling certifications.”

Working the numbers

Although the state’s prison population is closing in on the court-mandated limit of around 116,000, the new regulations must still be approved by California regulators. “If that happens, parole eligibility would change April 12,” KSBY noted. “There would be a public comment period. The early release would be phased in starting May 1, while the public review is underway. Final approval is possible by October.” In another shift, the Associated Press reported, the rules “would let the state phase out a long-running program that currently keeps nearly 4,300 inmates in private prisons in other states.”

That regime came under criticism last year as the federal government withdrew similar efforts. “California has transferred prisoners to private institutions, some of them in other states, for more than five years to relieve overcrowding in state prisons, but state, and local, use of them is beginning to be questioned,” the Chronicle reported last year. “One Bay Area lawmaker has called for the state to stop sending inmates to prisons far from their families or California inspectors, and another legislator is moving to stop cities and counties in California from contracting with private prisons to hold federal immigration detainees.”

Parole push

Continued pressure to limit action on some rules could come from law enforcement. “Police and prosecutors opposed the move for easier parole, arguing it would put dangerous offenders back on the streets too soon,” Voice of America recalled. “The new rules also change the process that prosecutors and victims use to object to early parole, doing away with lengthy formal parole hearings in favor of written statements. Prosecutors say victims have the right to be heard before any decision for parole is made.”

The new rule on parole “remains the top concern for the California District Attorneys Association,” San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe, the group’s president, indicated to the Associated Press. “Under the changes, prosecutors and victims would have 30 days to object in writing to the earlier paroles. It’s a much different process than the hours-long hearings used to consider parole for life-term inmates such as followers of cult leader Charles Manson, for instance, and the governor will have no role in the largely administrative decisions.”

The initiative’s details, first announced in late January, “would amend the fixed-sentence law Brown signed in 1976, to make prisoners found guilty of a non-serious, non-violent and non-sexual crimes eligible for parole,” according to the Huffington Post.”The governor estimated this might make as many as 7,000 inmates eligible to seek parole.”

In addition, HuffPost noted, Brown’s initiative would also call for a “credit system” of “time off for good behavior, to be run by prison officials, which might affect even more inmates than would the changes in parole eligibility.” The mechanics governing that kind of regime would be left to lawmakers or regulators.

Aware of the prospect of law-and-order pushback — at a time when populism has captivated many of his California critics — Brown “enlisted a platoon of law enforcement leaders — including San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis — to join him when he” rolled out the shorter-sentences measure, noted KQED.

“But those individual voices apparently did not portend a ringing endorsement from other prosecutors across the state: On Thursday, the California District Attorneys Association’s 17-member board of directors voted to oppose the initiative, with just one member abstaining,” the station reported. “The CDAA represents the state’s 58 district attorneys and is a political force in Sacramento. The group’s opposition to Brown’s ballot proposal may explain in part why he choose to go to the ballot instead of going through the state Legislature.”

Lining up opposition

Further fulfilling political expectations, prominent Republicans moved to mobilize support against Brown. In a mailing list email, former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson slammed the would-be law. “The initiative should be entitled ‘The Dangerous Streets Act: A Retreat to Lenient Sentencing of California’s Violent and Serious Criminals.’ If passed, it will undo the protections that were enacted to safeguard Californians from becoming crime victims in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” wrote Wilson, as Debra Saunders observed at the San Francisco Chronicle. Saunders continued:

“Like Wilson, Michael Rushford of the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation sees Brown’s plan as an evisceration of California’s landmark Three Strikes Sentencing Law and the state’s Victims’ Bill of Rights — both successful ballot measures that enhanced penalties for repeat offenders. They believe that realignment and Prop. 47 have led to the release of too many bad guys.”

For Brown, however, the proposed initiative would simply continue to reform what even critics acknowledge has long been a dysfunctional and at times abusive prison system. Already, Brown “has approved parole for roughly 2,300 lifers convicted of murder and about 450 lifers sentenced for lesser offenses — a revolution in a state that released only two lifers during former governor Gray Davis’s entire four-year term,” as the Washington Post observed.

Rising costs

Nevertheless, as the paper reported, Brown has faced a conundrum in following court orders to thin out the state’s incarcerated population: “As many as 90 percent of inmates in 2013 had either a violent or serious felony conviction, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That left the state with little choice for bringing prisoner counts down.”

Compounding the trouble, cost savings Brown promised for changing course have yet to materialize. “Federal judges required the state to reduce the headcount in the state’s 34 main adult prisons more than officials wished, according to the revised long-term plan Brown’s administration released Wednesday at the insistence of state lawmakers,” the Orange County Register noted. That change, said officials, lead to “a $3 billion annual difference between the promised savings and the $10.5 billion corrections department budget Gov. Jerry Brown proposed earlier this month, in part because the state also chose to boost the number of prison beds available.”

And in the wake of a withering state report on the culture of abuse that persists in the prison system, incoming secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Scott Kernan has vowed to invest in new leadership and diversity training programs for guards and other employees.

Thomas Hawk / flickr

After years spent under the glare of judicial scrutiny, California’s effort to clean up its prison system has run up against a fresh wave of challenges and controversy. Lawsuits, violence and Draconian measures have all increased costs while chipping away at support from the public and policymakers.

‘Potty watches’

Critics have no shortage of policies to go after. One stratagem under fire is the so-called “potty watch,” wherein prisoners are restrained, as ABC News reported, “for at least 72 hours or until they complete at least three closely watched bowel movements” — with guards investigating the feces for contraband. “Something is recovered from about four out of 10 inmates.”

The techniques used for restraining prisoners have become a particular focus of criticism. “Suspected smugglers are strip-searched, then placed in an isolation cell in which the toilet has been covered and the water turned off,” as ABC News noted. “Their clothing is taped shut at the waist and legs to prevent them from physically reaching body cavities, their hands are cuffed to a chain around their waist and their legs may be shackled. If they fight back, they can be strapped down by the arms and legs.”

A drug epidemic

But the drug problem in California’s prisons has become so severe that reform would have to strike at that challenge. Overdose rates have now tripled the national average for state prisons, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “The rate of drug overdose deaths in California prisons climbed between 2006 and 2013, the most recent year available, according to an annual death review for the federal court-appointed receiver who controls prison medical care.”

As the Associated Press reported earlier this summer, analysts have not been convinced that millions in spending and “the tough steps state officials took this year to stop illicit drugs from getting into prisons are having any effect, though they are prompting criticism from civil rights advocates.” Anecdotal evidence has cast a pall on screenings. Riverside resident Tania Gamboa, visiting her brother at Kern Valley state prison, faced a harrowing procedure, the AP observed:

She initially laughed when the ion machine tested positive for exposure to heroin, saying she doesn’t even drink alcohol. But she was crying after she was required to strip naked in front of two female correctional officers and squat to demonstrate that she was not concealing drugs.

Rising tensions

Drugs have become emblematic of California’s prison woes, which extend to the broader matter of simply maintaining order and safety for the incarcerated. A recent prison riot in Solano left guards making a grisly discovery of a murdered and disemboweled inmate’s body five hours after the victim first went missing.

And in an effort to save water, officials have turned off the taps on prisoners’ typical outdoor showers. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the Los Angeles Times “all showers outside of those in the housing units have been shut down as part of the statewide mandate to reduce water use by 25% due to the drought.”

Without delay, inmates’ attorneys bundled the action into a complaint brought against the state. “The aqua austerity in prison yards is included in a lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions on California’s death row, alongside complaints about the prolonged use of solitary confinement, inadequate food and a lack of due process,” the Times confirmed.

Some progress

Despite the battery of difficulties, the Golden State has managed to move forward with some key prison reforms. This month, California regained control of its own prison health care system, following ten long years of federal receivership in the wake of shocking failures. Last decade, as the AP reported, “a federal judge found that conditions in the state’s prisons were so poor that an average of an inmate each week was dying of medical malpractice or neglect. A receiver was appointed to run the system in 2006. Since then, the state has spent $2 billion for new prison medical facilities, doubled its annual prison health care budget to nearly $1.7 billion and reduced its prison population by more than 40,000 inmates.”

Meanwhile, facing another lawsuit over its usage of solitary confinement, the state has dialed back its reliance on the practice. “Inmates may no longer be put in isolation for refusing a cell assignment, for example, one of several prison infractions for which solitary confinement punishment has been reduced or dropped. And those being disciplined with segregation can cut that punishment in half with good behavior,” according to the Times.

“Warning that there is little time to lose,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “Gov. Jerry Brown is asking the California Legislature for $3.2 million to open nearly 100 more cells for condemned men at San Quentin State Prison. The proposed expansion would take advantage of cells made available as the state releases low-level drug offenders and thieves under a new law voters approved last year.”

The law, on the ballot as Proposition 47, has made a significant impact on the California prison system already, dropping the number of felonies in state by some 40,000.

According to the Times, Brown’s bid was slated for a subcommittee hearing next month chaired by state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley.

“California is in a Catch-22 situation,” she said in a statement provided to the Times. “We are required by the courts to address prison overcrowding and we are required by law to provide certain minimum conditions for housing death penalty inmates. The Legislature can’t avoid its responsibilities in these areas, even though the courts are currently considering the constitutionality of the death penalty, and I hope will agree to end it.”

Court complications

The Golden State’s death row has become the country’s largest, as KCRW reported, thanks to the uncertainty created by the judiciary:

“The capital punishment system has been in limbo since a court invalidated the state’s three-drug lethal injection system nearly a decade ago. No new protocols have been developed. Meanwhile, another judge has questioned the constitutionality of California’s capital punishment system. That judge ruled last year that the appeals process here takes so long that executions have become random.”

In that case, decided last year, Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that “the execution of a death sentence is so infrequent, and the delays preceding it so extraordinary, that the death penalty is deprived of any deterrent or retributive effect it might once have had. Such an outcome is antithetical to any civilized notion of just punishment.”

On appeal, the case would go before judges on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the most liberal in the country.

A stubborn problem

For Brown, the ordeal was just the latest in a string of severe frustrations and challenges meted out by state and federal judges. Through his controversial policy of “realigning” inmates from state prison to county jail, Brown was able to meet court standards applied to a degree of overcrowding that was held unconstitutional.

As CalWatchdog.com previously reported, however, the passage of Prop. 47 made all the difference. By turning many felony drug possessions into a misdemeanors, and decreasing penalties and sentences for other crimes, Prop. 47 prevented the prison population from rising above the court-ordered cap.

California’s prisons and jails have been plagued with difficulties since the implementation of realignment, however. One result has been a “revolving door” effect, where inmates hit the streets before time served, commit subsequent crimes, then return to the system.

Although Brown has struggled to satisfy activists to his left on prison issues, the controversy surrounding California’s frozen capital punishment system has increased the likelihood that voters and officials simply will seek to scrap it altogether.

In a sign of California’s role as a national bellwether, widespread criticism of lethal injection drugs led the American Pharmacists Association officially to discourage members from providing those drugs, an announcement made this week at its annual meeting in San Diego. As lethal injection has lost its former cachet as a humane alternative to other methods of execution, the prospect of a replacement method in California has faded.

With Sacramento legislators in a hurry to fund Brown’s request, but shut down the state’s death row pileup, pressure likely will increase on the courts to release California from the obligation of keeping the system running at all.

Yet overall state prison-guard compensation is up sharply. Reported the San Diego U-T:

Overtime hit a six-year high last year, allowing hundreds of prison system employees to more than double their pay. That’s created a situation in which more than a third of officers make more than $100,000 a year.

The payroll costs for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have grown $248 million per year higher than they were in 2009, a 5.3 percent increase. During the same period, the population under supervision fell 38 percent.

Going back to 2011, even then California prison guards made twice the pay of their counterparts in Texas, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “$71,000 a year, compared with $31,000.”

The California guards’ pay is even higher now — with fewer prisoners to watch behind bars.

The question now is how long this can last. Although a key part of the Democratic Party’s coalition, the prison guards union also competes for money against other public-employee unions, such as the California Teachers Association.

As is being seen in other instances, such as Latinos objecting to the low quality of state schools their kids attend, the Democratic coalition has many fissures. Factions will be fighting over budgets and policy.

During the high-crime era of the 1980s and 1990s, the prison guards held great clout in the state. But with California crimes hitting 50-year lows, as well as sentencing reform initiatives such as Proposition 47, the guards are not as powerful as they once were. Their recent pay increases may become large targets for other factions.

The program shifts lower-level offenders from the state prison system to county jails. It was opposed by Republicans in the Legislature because of the added burdens placed on local governments and taxpayers.

But the precarious achievement of fewer state prisoners also depended on Proposition 47, which was passed by voters last November. It reduced some criminal drug penalties.

But as the prison system struggles to keep numbers low, its string of adverse rulings and legal dealings is far from over.

As the Associated Press reports, California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation last Thursday met ahead of time a Feb. 2016 deadline to cut incarcerations at the state’s 34 prisons (excluding juvenile facilities) to 137.5 percent of capacity from the high of 144 percent. Appeasing the courts a full year early marks an important victory for Brown’s realignment policy.

As policies go, however, it has come with a cascade of practical costs. As CalWatchdog.com reported last December, the jails have faced an influx not just of prisoners but of the illegal trade in drugs they bring. Fusion opened a recent report on the intersection of drugs and tech with a bust at a California state prison involving contraband cellphones.

County jails have not only faced problems with smuggling, but the increased staffing and budgetary demands required to deal with taking in state prisons’ relatively tougher and more challenging inmates.

A patchwork result

But as the Los Angeles Times reports, the reduction in the state prison population cannot be attributed entirely to Brown’s success in moving some inmates to county jails. According to population reports cited by the Times, the number of state prisoners sank by 4,000 last year “due to the use of private prisons both in and out of California, enforcement of court orders to expand parole and early release programs, and passage of Proposition 47, making felony drug possession a misdemeanor.”

The impact of private, out-of-state prisons has been substantial. Last year, the Placer Herald recounts, “There were 8,763 California inmates serving their sentences out-of-state in private prisons in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. Seven more private prisons operate within California, housing an additional 4,170 inmates.”

But the role of Prop. 47 in fulfilling the judicial mandate has turned out to be central. In a November report, the Times notes, “The corrections agency had projected the inmate population to grow this year because of an uptick in felony convictions, which would eventually push the state above the court-ordered population cap.”

Those numbers are set to be revised next spring because of the passage of Prop. 47. By applying a misdemeanor offense to the most frequent crimes to carry a felony conviction, Prop. 47 took some 40,000 felonies out of the picture. At the same time, it lowered sentences for those crimes from a three-year maximum to a year at most.

For analysts following California’s attempts to curb its prison population, the role of drug crime has been central. As Zach Weissmueller notes at Reason magazine, California’s prison system still operates at around 40 percent higher than capacity. “One reason the state has found it so difficult to reduce its prison population is that the three-strikes law mandates harsh sentences for many drug offenders,” he writes.

He was referring to Proposition 184, which voters passed in 1994. It made tougher a three-strikes law passed earlier that year by the Legislature. This was during the end of the 1980s-early 1990s crime wave that pushed harsher sentencing laws on the books in California and other states, greatly increasing the number of prison and jail inmates.

Prop. 47 and Prop. 36, a 2012 initiative voters passed to reduce the harshness of Prop. 184, both are reactions to prison overcrowding as well as the general reduction in crime of recent years.

Legal complications

Just as Gov. Brown’s administration must consider how to keep incarceration levels below the current benchmark, another round of legal challenges has hit the prison system. In one case, plaintiffs charged state prisons used solitary confinement cells as “overflow” units for disabled inmates.

Ruling in the inmates’ favor, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken recently determined California violated both the Americans with Disabilities Act and previous court orders, the San Jose Mercury News reports:

“The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation agreed in 2012 to move the inmates from the cells. Still, Wilken found 211 inmates with disabilities were held in such cells between July 2013 and July 2014 — some for less than a day and others for a month or more.”

This and other legal challenges complicate the move to end prison overcrowding. But the general direction in California is to comply with the federal demands to end what is considered “cruel and unusual punishment.”

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.

Despite a forceful argument that federalism relieved the state of the added responsibilities, the U.S. Supreme Court persisted in making life more difficult for Brown. The justices refused to reconsider a decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which requires the state of California to ensure disabled prisoners in county jails receive the “reasonable accommodations” specified in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In an unusual move for high-ranking Democrats, Brown and state Attorney General Kamala Harris wanted the Supreme Court to consider that the 9th Circuit’s demands infringed on states’ 10th Amendment right to delegate power to local governments.

At stake is more than an important legal principle. Substantial expenditures are on the line. As the Associated Press reports, California could now be held liable for damages incurred in buildings not owned by the state. At the same time, state officials would have to wait until sued by parolees to gather any idea of how much money might have to be paid.

What’s more, Sacramento could be required to retrofit county jails — a costly, time-intensive process. Although neither the courts nor the plaintiffs involved raised that issue, California is technically vulnerable to a future ruling that demands exactly that. Brown’s and Harris’ resort to the 10th Amendment suggests that they take the possibility seriously.

A lasting burden

Brown’s struggles with the courts are exacting a measurable toll on his governorship. He faces an uphill battle on incarceration issues both with voters and fellow Democrats in the Legislature.

Although Brown has now broken even in public opinion polls on his treatment of crime. For instance, 46 percent still disapprove of his record on prisons, according to a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll.

In Sacramento, uncomfortable wrangling over proposed prison funds has now set in as well. Along with California’s county sheriffs, Brown wants $500 million in new bond money to expand the jails where prisoners affected by the 9th Circuit’s ruling will be held.

The push is part of Brown’s larger effort to manage another of the Supreme Court’s adverse rulings. Convinced that crowding in California prisons was so extreme as to be unconstitutional, the court’s decision drove Brown to implement a so-called “realignment” policy, shifting inmates out of state prisons and into county jails.

But that initiative has inspired a tug of war over how the bond money meant to smooth its way will be spent. AP reports that Senate Democrats want $85 million more than Brown would allocate to go toward mental illness programs for officers and guards.

Mental illness

In part, legislators are pivoting off the fear of untreated mental illness, heightened by the recent shootings in Isla Vista.

Additionally, the federal government is complicating Brown’s aims in yet another way. A recent Justice Department report is fueling demand for more mental illness spending. In a scathing review, Los Angeles county jails are accused of violating the Constitution by failing to afford mentally ill inmates an adequate level of care.

Although much of the report focuses on inmate suicide and suicide risk, general conditions in some jails were described as “deplorable,” Reuters reports.

From the standpoint of those currently calling the shots in the judicial and executive branches of the federal government, California’s prison system must be reformed, whatever the cost, until it passes constitutional muster. From the standpoint of Brown, however, the pressure to accelerate reform is making it harder to implement durable solutions.

Yet Brown faces an unofficial deadline of his own. If he is unable to turn around public opinion on prisons well before November, he will hand a fresh set of talking points to Republican opponent Neel Kashkari, who is hungry for a political issue that will unite Republicans and resonate with Californians regardless of party registration.

Explained the San Jose Mercury News, “At the same time, the judges set strict guidelines for how the state must comply with the court orders, including limits on the number of inmates that can be shipped to out-of-state prisons.”

That means more medical and health care, too, and the costs to match. Combined with the prison release program that’s already well under way, the new rules add up to a burden that California taxpayers just can’t shake off — despite claims that keeping more Californians in jail is too big a drain on state budgets.

Last summer, wrote columnist George Skelton, Gov. Jerry Brown hoped to appease the courts’ demands by shipping prisoners to private and local jails, including some out of state. The plan, known as “realignment,” would set taxpayers back over a billion dollars in three years.

At the time, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, called the governor’s scheme “a waste of money.” Steinberg then began working for the same sort of outcome the judges imposed.

More expensive

This year, California’s compliance with judicial dictates has delivered a prison system that’s only getting more expensive — despite shedding inmates. In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald tallied the costs: “California has added well over $1 billion in new prison health-care facilities,” although “the prison population has dropped by more inmates than are housed in all but a few states.”

Excluding experts’ fees, over a decade of legal bills stemming from California’s prison cases have stuck taxpayers with a tab of some $38 million. Alone, the fees raked in by the special master appointed to supervise mental health treatment add up to $48 million.

These kinds of figures are set to grow even higher. Mac Donald wrote, “California now spends $17,924 per prisoner on medical treatment — six times what Texas spends, four times what the federal government spends in its prisons, and three times New York’s rate. Health care makes up one-third of California’s prison budget.”

Yet Steinberg called February’s ruling “an opportunity to redirect hundreds of millions of precious dollars from a strategy that didn’t get us anywhere to one holding out real hope that tens of thousands of people with mental health and substance abuse issues, with no housing or job skills, can become productive members of society.”

That kind of talk creates the illusion that moving taxpayer dollars around will actually decrease the long-term volume of Californians flowing into “the system,” not just flowing out.

Skelton pointed out that California’s recidivism rate, at 70 percent, is double the national average. He attributed the imbalance to “California’s old stack-’em-like-cordwood mentality.”

But just last year, according to a study by the Pew Center on the States, 58 percent of California prisoners still were returned to prison within three years of release.

To be sure, as Mac Donald indicated, a “reform” that all but eliminated punishment for parole violations helped drop the prisoner count by 24,000 in two years, down to 120,000. She reported that the number now is “at the lowest level in 17 years and well below the 150,000-person ‘operational’ capacity of the prison system.”

Yet even as municipal jails face the brunt of prisoner transfers, cities and counties now confront the additional prospect of having to arrest, try, convict and jail recidivists all on their own.

Pressure on Brown

Democrats and progressives nationwide view California as especially negligent, or worse, toward its prisoners. Brown has brushed off such criticism. California, he said, spent “billions and billions of money that’s not going to child care, that’s not going to schools, that’s not going to higher ed. It’s going to gold plate, at this point, our prisons.” Back then, he declared the “prison emergency” to be “over.” 

But now, Brown’s January budget proposal for fiscal 2014-15, which begins on July 1, calls on California to sell $500 million of additional bonds to fund county jail construction. That’s a response to concerns that realignment would push big new costs onto municipalities and counties.

Brown’s proposal, however, doesn’t guarantee future state funding for subsequent county jails. As a result, Brown faces dissatisfaction from both sides of the aisle.

Brown releases the May Revision to his budget in two weeks. A key thing to look for will be if he changes any of the spending assumptions for prisons.

Republicans are opposed to more government spending. Democrats hope to reduce the state’s incarceration footprint. It remains to be seen how taxpayers will respond.