Heightening the stakes in the criminal justice debate roiling the country at large, Gov. Jerry Brown could soon greenlight a law that would allow some state felons to vote from jail.

California has wound up in the middle of the pack on state laws around criminals and voting rights. “Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons to vote while behind bars,” KTVU noted, while “14 states restore voting rights automatically when a person is released from prison. 4 states, including California, restore voting rights after completion of parole.” The new rule, if Brown were to sign AB2466, carves out an exception for felons shifted out of state prisons due to realignment.

Constitutional claims

For that reason, advocates of the bill have characterized it as more of a formality than an overhaul of the state’s criminal law. In 2011, the Criminal Justice Realignment Act “created new sentencing categories for low-level, nonviolent offenders to remedy unconstitutionally overcrowded state prisons,” the NAACP’s Janai Nelson noted in the Los Angeles Times. “Instead of time in state prison, minor felony convictions now result in a term in the county jail followed by release under what’s known as mandatory or community supervision.” Given the opportunity to rule on how that changed status squares with voting laws, “Alameda County Superior Court already has held that people subject to this new form of mandatory or community supervision are not ‘on parole’ and therefore retain their right to vote,” Nelson added, claiming AB2466 would simply “codify that ruling” and eliminate any “ambiguity in how a felony conviction affects voter eligibility” in California. 

But critics have countered that the parole language is not as relevant to a proper interpretation of standing law as other elements of voters’ 1976 addition to the state constitution. “The Legislature shall prohibit improper practices that affect elections and shall provide for the disqualification of electors while mentally incompetent or imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony,” that language ran in full. Although supporters of AB2466 “contend that the word ‘imprisoned’ in the California Constitution refers to a state prison, but not a county jail,” the looser interpretation AB2466 embraces “would create an odd circumstance in which inmates out of prison on parole are prohibited from voting, but felons behind bars in county jails could vote” — a view held by the state Sheriffs’ Association, as legislative director Cory Salzillo suggested to the Daily Signal. Given the low level of the judiciary ruling used as a baseline by AB2466, that could invite further litigation that would effectively freeze or scuttle the legislation before it is implemented. 

Signaling and consequences

For the bill’s supporters, that risk appeared to be one worth taking. “I wrote AB2466 because I want to send a message to the nation that California will not stand for discrimination in voting,” Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, said in a statement, indicating a preference to pass legislation now and consider later whether it squares legitimately with the state Constitution. Weber has also advanced a bill that would add a five year period of eligibility for nonviolent felons petitioning a sentencing reduction in the wake of Proposition 47, which changed their crimes to misdemeanors. “But issues surrounding Proposition 47 generate significant controversy” as well, the Los Angeles Times recently observed. “The California Police Chiefs Assn. has blamed the initiative for a recent increase in property crimes across the state.”

In a final wrinkle fueling concern around the vote-from-jail law, impacted felons would face a logical but potentially problematic geographic restriction on their vote. “Under AB2466, these inmates would vote in the district where they are incarcerated,” noted state Sen. Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, in the Orange County Register. “For example, an inmate whose home residence is in San Clemente would be able to vote for local races affecting Santa Ana, since that is where Orange County’s Central Jail is located.” 

The first of the policies was Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2011 decision to “realign” the corrections system and shift 30,000 prisoners from state institutions to county jails. With many county facilities as overcrowded as state prisons, this led to an estimated release of 18,000 people who were incarcerated in California. The second was state voters’ 2014 approval of Proposition 47, which reclassified some drug and property crime offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, which also led to more convicted criminals avoiding getting locked up. It was strongly supported by the governor.

What’s been the effect? That is a crucial question, given that California’s violent crime rate jumped significantly in the first half of 2015. In California’s 68 cities with populations of 100,000 or more, violent crime increased by 11 percent, according to statistics compiled by the FBI.

This suggests that “realignment” and Prop. 47 might have a cumulative effect. A December 2013 report by the Public Policy Institute of California downplayed any link between a smaller increase in violent crime in 2011 and 2012 and the effects of “realignment”:

We find that California’s crime rates increased between 2011 and 2012 — violent crime went up 3.4 percent and property crime went up 7.6 percent. These rates vary widely across the state, with California’s 10 largest counties generally seeing greater increases in crime than in the state overall. However, despite this pattern of increase, crime rates remain at historically low levels in California today.

 

How does realignment relate to the recent uptick in crime? Our analysis of violent crime finds no evidence that realignment has had an effect on the most serious offenses, murder and rape. The evidence on robbery is more uncertain, with a possible indication of a modest increase related to realignment. California’s overall increases in violent crime between 2011 and 2012 appear to be part of a broader upward trend also experienced in other states.

Did reducing felonies help ‘the crooks win’?

Now, 17 months after Proposition 47’s adoption, opinions are beginning to harden on its effects.

In November, Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell depicted the initiative as a well-intentioned failure. And on PoliceOne.com, a website on police issues, a December opinion piece declared “the crooks won.”

Inmates are fans of Prop. 47 because it keeps them out of jail, allowing them to keep using illegal drugs and keep committing crime. Even if they miss their court date (which in turn gives them a warrant), inmates know the crimes and the misdemeanor warrants will not keep them locked up long. Inmates view misdemeanors as “not a big deal” and shrug their shoulders. It does not matter that there are hardworking citizens who are being victimized. Criminals usually never show remorse or empathy for their victims. Criminals have a great way of decriminalizing and minimizing their crimes. With Prop. 47, the state and the criminals both are doing just that.

But William Lansdowne, a veteran California police chief, strongly challenges this assessment in an op-ed posted Thursday by the San Francisco Chronicle:

Since Prop. 47 passed, critics have tried to scapegoat it for a rise in crime, but there’s no evidence proving such an assertion. As the former police chief for San Diego, San Jose and Richmond, I know all too well that every shift in crime must be addressed. There is nothing more important than public safety. But in paying close attention, we need to be honest about the facts and avoid misleading the public.

‘The studies are not done and the results aren’t in’

Others suggest that both McDonnell and Lansdown are too quick to draw conclusions:

Keramet Reiter, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, said the ballot measure has been used by critics as a “convenient scapegoat” for the rise in crime. The reality, she said, is more complicated in a state that is undergoing broad changes to its criminal justice system, including a massive shift of inmates from state prisons to local jails.

 

The Los Angeles Police Department has reported a double-digit increase in property crime so far this year, but Chief Charlie Beck said it is premature to fault Proposition 47.

 

“The studies are not done and the results aren’t in,” Beck said.

That is from a November Los Angeles Times report.

The rise of Big Data has led to many changes in policing strategies in recent years, most notably in New York City, where the NYPD uses algorithms to predict likely trouble spots. But big-think arguments over why crime has gone down sharply over the last 25 year have actually gotten more complex, not less. Last year, Vox detailed 16 different theories explaining the phenomenon.

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

A momentous court settlement has given new shape to California’s multi-year struggle with the courts over its criminal justice system, rolling back the state’s reliance on solitary confinement as a way of dealing with gangs and violence in prison. “Many such prisoners are left in solitary confinement indefinitely, with severe psychological effects,” The New York Times observed; “over the years, hundreds have spent more than a decade in isolation.”

A sudden shift

The practice had come under special scrutiny as Gov. Jerry Brown ameliorated overcrowding through his controversial strategy of “realigning” inmates with lesser sentences to county jails. “Under the terms of the settlement, state authorities will only send inmates to solitary if they commit new and serious crimes in prison, like murders or violent assaults,” NPR reported. “California prison officials have a year to review files of inmates in isolation now. The process is designed to send many of those prisoners back into the general prison population.”

California’s secretary of corrections and rehabilitation Jeffrey Beard said that over 1,000 inmates had been released from solitary, telling the Los Angeles Times that “the prison system was largely unable to make the case for change, and show solitary confinement could work, until dealing with overcrowding problems that had inmates sleeping in bunks set up in prison gyms and day rooms.”

Filed three years ago, the now-settled lawsuit took shape as a class action “brought on behalf of thousands of inmates who had filled the Pelican Bay State Prison isolation wing for alleged gang affiliation,” the Huffington Post noted. According to one of the plaintiffs, the Center for Constitutional Rights, over 500 inmates “had spent more than a decade locked in solitary at the time the lawsuit was filed,” reported the Huffington Post, with 78 prisoners locked in the so-called Security Housing Unit for over two decades.

Legal shifts

Solitary confinement has earned the ire of California’s criminal justice activists for years on end, and with the state’s legal woes surrounding its prison system, some in Sacramento took up the cause. In collaboration with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, authored Senate Bill 124, focusing on the extension of solitary to state and county juvenile detention centers. The bill “would ban the use of solitary confinement for longer than four hours at a time,” East Bay Express reported, barring facilities from doling out stints in solitary to punish young offenders and authorizing the practice only “when juveniles pose an immediate, substantial risk to themselves or others.” Inmates whose mental illness factored into their behavior would also be safe from solitary confinement.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, which had angrily mandated a reduction in California’s crowded state prison population, also seemed to be circling around the state’s use of solitary. Considering an appeal this summer from one of the state’s prisoners on death row, Justice Anthony Kennedy “had his law clerks dig up an 1890 case in which the Supreme Court had decided that even for those prisoners sentenced to death, solitary confinement contained a ‘particular terror and a peculiar mark of infamy,'” Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted in New York magazine.

A spate of prisoner protests in California fueled a growing sense that solitary confinement had become too routine and too ineffective around the country. As the New York Times observed, “a number of corrections officials across the country have increasingly come to see locking up inmates for years at a time as ineffective. Some human rights groups have assailed it as torture, and tens of thousands of inmates across California have participated in hunger strikes since 2011 to protest the state’s use of solitary.”

Although the state’s agreement will remove gang affiliation from its list of offenses punishable by isolation, few have speculated what was likely to happen once thousands of formerly solitary inmates were returned to prisons’ general populations.

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.”

But the reality propelling interest in the new measure is that California has proven unable to effectively run its prison system the way that courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court — have demanded.

Major changes

Proposition 47 landed on the ballot with the backing of San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and former San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne. If the measure passes, the most frequent current crimes that carry felony convictions will be downgraded to misdemeanors. Prison time will be lowered, too, for such crimes to one year at most from the current three-year maximum.

That, as the Los Angeles Times reported, would be good news for Californians convicted of “drug possession, petty theft, possession of stolen goods, shoplifting, forgery and writing bad checks.” Those crimes made up 58,000 of the Golden State’s 202,000 felony convictions (based on 2012 figures, the most recent available). “Analysts say about 40,000 such cases would be reduced to misdemeanors; the initiative exempts offenses involving more than $950 and people with criminal records that include violence or sex offenses.”

The arguments for and against Prop. 47 haven’t surprised many California residents. On the one hand, it has long been common knowledge that California’s incarcerated population is high — by absolute measures, and relative to other states’ levels. In a black eye for Gov. Jerry Brown, his administration has been ensnared by the courts in a complex and awkward process called “realignment,” a way of shifting inmates from crowded state prisons into the county jail system.

On the other hand, Californians have not forgotten their state’s more sensational and frightening crimes. One of the worst even received mention during the recent gubernatorial debate between Brown and Neel Kashkari, his Republican challenger.

To ease overcrowding, California released Jerome Sidney DeAvila from prison; soon thereafter, in 2013 he committed a heinous crime involving rape and murder. The state’s police chiefs’ association has decried Prop. 47, saying the “dangerous and radical” measure will “endanger Californians.”

Easing up on convictions and sentencing would give California’s justice system a much-needed reprieve as it struggles to obey court orders to de-crowd. Yet it would be certain to ratchet up the risk of more violent crime — perhaps to a historic degree. In short, Prop. 47 has become associated with two different outcomes, one which many Californians desire, and one which none do.

An unprecedented coalition

With the measure poised between competing outcomes, its fate in November may come down to a public relations campaign. Oftentimes, ballot measures sink or swim depending on how voters view their fiscal implications.

Not so with Prop. 47. Although it would save the state some money, the amount recouped — a few hundred million dollars — would be a relative trifle given the size of California’s budget of more than $100 billion a year for the general fund.

That has placed a premium on presentation for Prop. 47’s key supporters. In fact, the coalition of activists and public figures behind Prop. 47 has raised eyebrows nationwide — suggesting that America’s traditional political battle lines have been scrambled when it comes to criminal justice reform.

Liberal and progressive support for a softer approach to crime has, predictably, given Prop. 47 a substantial push; George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center, based in Washington, D.C., kicked in $1 million.

At the same time, observers took special notice when former Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also a 2012 presidential candidate, teamed with billionaire Wayne Hughes to promote Prop. 47 in an opinion piece for the Times. If conservative-heavy states in the South could reform their own prison systems, claimed Gingrich and Hughes, surely California could as well.

The voters will have their say on Nov. 4.

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.

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.

These didn’t pull any punches, echoing what they were hearing from their constituents: Asian parents didn’t want racial quotas keeping their deserving kids out of the UC and CSU campuses of their choice. Their framing: What you define as “social justice” is punishing Asians in the name of atoning for historical white racism.

But will this sharp single-issue split lead to an Asian political realignment? Or just to a shakier Democratic coalition in which Asian-Americans are still largely reliable members?

The latter is far more likely because of how damaged the GOP brand is with Asian-Americans. A new Politico analysis written by three academics opens with the painful account of Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts’ awkward, patronizing and goofy comments to an Indian-American doctor nominated by President Obama to be surgeon general, then says the following:

“… this is exactly the sort of exchange that makes Asian Americans — the fastest growing ethnic group in the country — more likely to identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans, and by stunning margins. In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won 73 percent of the Asian American vote, exceeding his support among Hispanics (71 percent) and women (55 percent).”

If GOP can’t understand problem, that’s telling

Politico points out something that I find amazing: Republicans …

“… seem generally mystified as to what they might be doing wrong. …  Asian Americans as a group have certain characteristics that would ordinarily predict a Republican political affiliation, most strikingly their level of income, which on average, is higher than any other ethnic group in the United States. …

“Other conservatives have pointed to less tangible characteristics of Asian Americans, such as an emphasis on discipline in child rearing and a penchant for entrepreneurship, that ought to make them Republicans. ‘If you are looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define “natural”,’” notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray. “And yet something has happened to define conservatism in the minds of Asians as deeply unattractive.”

Yes, “something has happened,” but it’s hardly a mystery. Republicans are perceived as looking down on nonwhites. GOPers may say it’s unfair, but nothing else explains their huge underperformance with Asian voters. The academics agree, and offer some hard evidence, not just anecdotes.

“First, there’s race. The feeling of social exclusion stemming from their ethnic background might push Asian Americans away from the Republican Party. Many studies, like Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s work on the psychology of intergroup relations, have shown that one’s identification with a broad category of people—be it on the basis of language, ethnic or racial solidarity or some other trait—is important politically. Republican rhetoric implying that the (non-white) ‘takers’ are plundering the (white) ‘makers’ has cultivated a perception that the Republican Party is less welcoming of minorities. …

“And many Asian-Americans do feel like they don’t get equal treatment. According to the 2008 National Asian American Survey, nearly 40 percent of Asian Americans suffered one of the following forms of racial discrimination in their lifetime: being unfairly denied a job or fired; unfairly denied a promotion at work; unfairly treated by the police; unfairly prevented from renting or buying a home; treated unfairly at a restaurant or other place of service; or been a victim of a hate crime. We found that self-reported racial discrimination was positively correlated with identification with the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.”

Making the case for Kashkari: 2 plus 2 is 4

Now if this doesn’t make it obvious to California Republicans that letting Neel Kashkari be their gubernatorial candidate for the inevitable November GOP loss to Jerry Brown, nothing will. I wish he didn’t vote for Obama in 2008 and I wish he didn’t see his role as “bailout czar” in the big-government TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) as such a badge of honor.

But if you want Asian-Americans in California to take a fresh look at the GOP — and if you’re a Republican, you do, you do, you do — then the political math is about as difficult as two plus two equals four.

Strategery: Sometimes you just have to go there.

No way, as illustrated by a new report from state Auditor Elaine Howle on “high-risk” government programs that got cursory coverage from the Capitol press corps. The state teachers’ pension system, the prison system, emergency preparedness, computer systems and public health efforts are all found wanting. Those are some pretty crucial categories of government operations.

Here’s a sample of Howle’s warnings:

“The funding status of the Defined Benefit Program of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) has not improved, and it remains on the high-risk list. … The inability to adjust contributions, as well as poor investment returns due to economic recessions, have caused the funding ratio of the CalSTRS Defined Benefit Program to decrease from 98 percent in 2001 to 67 percent in 2012, well below the 80 percent considered fiscally sound. At the current contribution rate and actuarially estimated rate of return on investments, the Defined Benefit Program’s funding ratio will continue to drop and assets will eventually be depleted. Similarly, the State’s estimated accrued liability of $63.85 billion related to retiree health benefits is almost completely unfunded and continues to increase. …”

“We have added the 2011 realignment of funding and responsibility between the State and local governments as a new high-risk issue. Realignment shifts the funding of and responsibility for many criminal justice and social services programs from the State primarily to county governments. The funding for these programs totals approximately $6 billion. The State does not currently have access to reliable and meaningful data concerning the realignment. As a result, the impact of realignment cannot be fully evaluated at this time. Even so, initial data indicate that local jails may not have adequate capacity and services to handle the influx of inmates caused by realignment.”

Infrastructure, workfore prep, emergency records all weak

“Maintaining and improving the State’s infrastructure remains on our list of high-risk issues. The State’s investments in transportation and water supply and flood management infrastructure have not kept up with demands. The California Transportation Commission estimated that the State faces a funding shortfall of more than $290 billion to adequately maintain its transportation infrastructure for the 10-year period from 2011 through 2020. Similarly, the State’s water supply and flood management infrastructure requires significant investments. …”

“The State continues to face challenges related to its workforce and succession planning as the proportion of employees approaching retirement age increases. While state agencies we reviewed had generally developed workforce and succession plans to ensure continuity of critical services, we identified notable exceptions. Further, with the recent reorganization combining the State Personnel Board and the California Department of Personnel Administration into the California Department of Human Resources, the State faces the general risk associated with this type of structural change.”

“The State’s emergency preparedness remains an area of high risk. Two key California agencies that oversee statewide emergency management — the California Department of Public Health (Public Health) and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) — lack fully developed strategic plans to guide their emergency preparedness efforts. “

Home to Silicon Valley still a joke on IT front

Then there’s the hardy perennial: the state’s computer klutziness.

“The high costs of certain projects and the failure of others continues to make the State’s oversight of information technology (IT) projects an area of high risk. As of July 2013 the California Department of Technology (CalTech) reported that 46 IT projects with total costs of more than $4.9 billion were under development. In our August 2011 high risk report, we discussed four large IT projects that would have a major impact on state operations — the State Controller’s Office’s 21st Century Project, the Judicial Branch’s California Court Case Management System, the California Department of Finance’s Financial Information System for California, and Corrections’ Strategic Offender Management System. With this update, we examined the status of these projects, as well as the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ IT Modernization Project. We found that three of the five IT projects experienced major problems that require either part of the project or the entire project to be suspended or even terminated. “

“Finally, Public Health and the California Department of Health Care Services (Health Care Services) remain on the list of agencies exhibiting high-risk characteristics. Public Health continues to face challenges and weaknesses in program administration and is slow to implement audit recommendations with a direct impact on public health. Its unresolved recommendations have increased from 20 to 23 in the past two years. Many of these recommendations have a direct impact on public health and safety and, if not implemented, could adversely affect the State.”

This doesn’t exactly paint a picture of a well-run government. Somehow I doubt The New York Times or any of the other Jerry Brown fans in East Coast newsrooms will get around to mentioning any of this.