January 17, 2010
LA Times, SF Chron blast Gov’s private prison plans
ON PRISON SPENDING: State must address causes of overcrowding
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made at least two radical proposals in his State of the State address earlier this month. Both of them concern the state's budget-busting incarceration system. Neither of them is the most direct way to tackle it.The state is going to have to address the prison system this year, if for no other reason than the courts are forcing it to do so. Last August, a panel of three federal judges ruled that, thanks to overcrowding, mental and medical health programs in California's prisons were so inadequate as to be unconstitutional. The panel has given the state two years to reduce the number of inmates by 40,000…
LINK - SFGate.com (San Francisco Gate)
Editorial: A poor prison plan for California
Gov. Schwarzenegger's latest proposal combines a destructive budgeting formula with an untested theory about privatization.When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed shifting female inmates out of prisons to community detention centers in 2006, the Legislature said no. When he asked lawmakers the following year to approve $10.9 billion in bonds to build new prisons while also reforming sentencing laws and parole rules, they reduced the bond package and jettisoned the reforms. Last year, when he asked them to cut the prison budget by $1.2 billion, they fell about $200 million short. We don't blame the governor for being frustrated, but we do fault him for apparently giving up.
Schwarzenegger's latest prison plan, unveiled in his State of the State address earlier this month, is less a serious policy proposal than a hunk of red meat tossed out at voters who are understandably furious about cuts in education spending. It combines a deeply destructive budgeting formula with an untested theory about prison privatization…
LINK - LATimes.com
