January 14, 2010
Gov’s prison & education plan called “True Lies” by law professor
Most of what Governor Schwarzenegger has said during his six years in office about California's bloated carceral state is true. Most of his proposals to move us beyond this obvious disaster for our polity amount to lies.
I have nothing against rhetoric, in fact I make my living producing and analyzing it (with apologies to the professionals in the rhetoric department). Indeed, I had great hopes that this action hero Governor might really use his clear rhetorical skills to tell Californians that we have too much fear embodied in our penal code and prison policies.
• He called the parole system "broken."
• He described our prisons as involved in "warehousing people" (a phrase used by Marxist criminologists in my days in graduate school).
• He renamed our prison agency the "Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation" (a bit repetitive, but the right direction).
• And just the other day he spoke about the shame of a state that spends more on prisons than higher education (as if he was just arriving in the state).Sadly, beyond renaming the boxes, Governor Schwarzenegger's policy moves have mostly been non-serious, including this proposal to use our constitution to favor higher education spending over prisons…
LINK - CaliforniaProgressReport.com
