Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger declared another fiscal emergency, and proposed an $82 billion budget – three billion dollars below the barebones survival estimate of my economist friend."
Amidst all of the doom-and-gloom cuts, and the accompanying rage as the state that until recently epitomised possibility in America continues to implode, one policy change stood out, offering a glimmer of better priorities in the years ahead. Schwarzenegger called for a state constitutional amendment to ensure that the state never spent less than 10% of its general fund on higher education and never spent more than seven percent on prisons.
For years, criminal justice reformers and an increasing number of journalists have argued that California's reflexive tough-on-crime policies were bankrupting the state. California has gone from having a prison population of fewer than 30,000 in the late 1970s to a prison population of about 170,000 today. It has passed laws such as "three strikes and you're out" that have resulted in tens of thousands of men and women serving decades behind bars for relatively low-level third offenses. It has the country's most dysfunctional parole system. It has a medical and mental health system for its prisons that is so awful the federal courts have declared them to be unconstitutional. It has a trade union for guards that, until a new leadership revamped it a couple years back, bludgeoned much of the political establishment to support prison-boom policies that served mainly to provide jobs and overtime pay to the guards rather than to promote public safety. And, despite a $10bn annual budget, the department of corrections and rehabilitation is so strapped for resources that it frequently has to triple bunk prisoners and, over the past year, has dismantled many of its drug rehab and vocational training programs.