June 24, 2011
The Golden State’s Iron Bars
“To borrow from Martin Luther King Jr.,” the head of the California prison guards union said a few years ago, “today I have a dream. I have a dream that the bricks and mortar that were planned to build new prisons will instead be used to build new schools…that an ounce of prevention will be embraced instead of a pound of cure.”
The place was the 2007 California Democratic convention. The speaker was Mike Jimenez, who had become president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) in 2002. Jimenez was attempting to set a new tone for the prison guards, who under his predecessor Don Novey had become the Golden State’s most powerful, feared, and obstructive public-sector union. And in at least one way, Jimenez succeeded: The tone of CCPOA became far more moderate than it had been under Novey’s hard-line leadership...
LINK - Reason.com
