CCPOA.org News Blog

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is accomplishing right now what he failed to do in 2005 when he tried to put the state’s major labor unions out of business and downsize the state government. At that time there was no economic catastrophe to point to as an excuse to shred the social safety net. But today, thanks to an economic crisis his good friend George W. Bush gave us, he’s launching a frontal assault against virtually all of the state’s public sector institutions. California Republicans have always hated social programs they believed mirrored Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and they’ve tried in good times and in bad to dismantle them. Now they’re seizing the current crisis to enact their wildest free-market fantasies.

“No matter the nationality, no matter the religion, no matter the ethnic background,” Schwarzenegger told an adoring crowd at the 2004 Republican National Convention, “America brings out the best in people. And as governor of the great state of California, I see the best in Americans every day — our police, our firefighters, our nurses, doctors, and teachers, our parents.”

And now he’s proudly sticking it to those same people he praised so fulsomely five years ago when it was politically expedient for him to do so…

LINK - HuffingtonPost.com (Slow-loading page, but worth the wait!)

The company that operates the Mississippi prison where a man escaped and later was arrested in the shooting of a Metro officer admits there was some sort of breakdown that allowed Joseph Jackson to escape custody.

Related: Watch This Story

Police and prison officials are trying to determine how Jackson, and his suspected accomplice, Courtney Logan hatched a daring plan that led to Jackson’s escape from custody and ultimately the shooting of Metro officer Sgt. Mark Chestnut on Thursday.

“Without a doubt, there is a breakdown somewhere. We definitely want to determine where that is,” said Steven Owen of Corrections Corporation of America, the company that operates the Mississippi prison that housed Jackson…

LINK - WSMV.com

A Victorville parolee was arrested on suspicion of child cruelty after he reportedly assaulted his 13-year-old cousin, possibly fracturing his jaw, Sheriff’s deputies said.

Deputies responded to a call of an assault on a child 10:20 p.m. Wednesday in the 10500 block of Arlington Street, in Adelanto, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

The victim suffered a fat lip, facial lacerations, broken teeth and a possible broken jaw, deputies said. Paramedics assessed and treated the victim at the scene, but he was driven to a local hospital by his mother…

LINK - SBSun.com

Police have questions after a shooting this Saturday morning in Indio, but they aren’t getting any answers from the victim.

It happened around 8:00 a.m. on the 45-300 block of Park Street.

A passerby reportedly spotted a man with a gunshot wound in the chest and took him to JFK hospital….

LINK - KESQ.com News

California’s cost of guarding, feeding, clothing, medicating and supposedly educating its nearly 170,000 prison inmates and supervising 110,000 parolees is about $10 billion a year. And it’s very easily the fastest-growing segment of the deficit-ridden state budget over the past decade.

It is, by a very wide margin, the costliest prison system among the largest states, with a per-inmate cost that prison officials tag at around $45,000 a year, roughly what it costs to send a youngster to one of the more prestigious private universities.

The average among the nation’s 10 most populous states, according to one recent calculation, is $27,237 per year per inmate, including states with substantially higher incarceration rates, such as Texas…

LINK - SacBee.com

Solano County’s parolee re-entry program will cease operations Wednesday.

“It’s completely over with,” said Tony Pearsall, executive director of Fighting Back Partnership, which runs the program.

Founded three years ago on a $600,000 state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation grant, the parolee re-entry program provided skills training, case management and support for about 900 parolees released into Solano County…

LINK - ContraCostaTimes.com

A parolee has been convicted of murder for dismembering a man’s body and dumping it in two trash bins in December 2007.

Frank Ruiz had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but was convicted on Thursday. The 23-year-old is scheduled to return to court Monday for the trial’s sanity phase.

Authorities say the killing of 47-year-old Patrick Moore was discovered after a cleaning woman found what appeared to be meat in plastic shopping bags in Ruiz’s room, and he was told to remove it. Moore’s remains were found in two trash bins at a liquor store and a drug store…

LINK - MercuryNews.com

The state’s appeals court will determine whether Nashville’s Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs state prisons, is equivalent to a governmental entity when it comes to turning over records.

A former prisoner-turned-activist, who won the case at the Chancery Court level, is suing for the release of several documents, including audits and contracts.

Appellate judges heard arguments Thursday from the corporation’s attorney, Joe Welborn, and Memphis civil rights attorney, Andy Clarke, who is representing prison-rights activist Alex Friedmann. It takes weeks, if not months, for the appeals court to make a decision…

LINK - Tennessean.com

A Nashville police officer was shot multiple times Thursday afternoon by a motorist he stopped along Interstate 40.

Two suspects were taken in custody shortly after the shooting. One of them is a Mississippi prison inmate who escaped from custody Thursday morning.

Nashville police spokesman Don Aaron identified the wounded officer as Sgt. Mark Chesnut, who was reported alert and talking to doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center shortly after the 1:20 p.m. shooting…

LINK - CommercialAppeal.com

A 45-year-old parolee is back behind bars Friday after being arrested in Valley Center on suspicion of threatening to kill his former parole officer, a sheriff’s sergeant said.

Jeffrey Scott Ashbaugh was arrested at his aunt and uncle’s home in the 12300 block of Santa Catalina Road around 3:45 p.m. Thursday, according to San Diego County sheriff’s Sgt. Bob Niderost.

Earlier in the day, Ashbaugh made statements that he had obtained a long rifle and was going to kill his former parole officer, Niderost said, adding that a .22 caliber rifle was found in the living area of the mobile home Ashbaugh had been living in…

LINK - 10News.com

The Schwarzenegger administration has rejected a plan designed to end years of litigation over inmate medical care in California’s prison system.

In a letter obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate tells a court-appointed receiver that the state cannot afford the $1.9 billion fix.

It cites legislation signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007 that provides about $8 billion for prison construction, including $1 billion dedicated to health care improvements…

LINK - ChicoER.com (Chico Enterprise-Record)

State controller John Chiang warned today that if legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fail to come up with a budget-balancing package in the next week, he would begin paying California’s bills with IOUs on July 2.

The controller’s warning came as legislators began what many on both sides of the aisle acknowledged was a rhetorical song-and-dance over closing a $24 billion deficit that stretches over the fiscal year that ends Tuesday and the one that begins Wednesday…

…A federal court ruled in 1996 that state employees couldn’t be paid with IOUs. Others who receive them will draw interest on them, but banks and other financial institutions can refuse to accept them. Chiang said the IOUs would have a maturity date of Oct. 1…

LINK - SacBee.com