The Lame Duck Governator Takes a Misguided Stab at Prison Reform

After years of allowing California's prisons to grow at an uncontrolled pace, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used his final state of the state speech on Wednesday to call for a mandatory rebalancing of the state budget to focus on maintaining the state's world-class universities and cutting back on prison spending.

It sounds good, but is it all talk? He's raising these issues too late to personally do much about it (he'll be out of office a year from now), and he's proposing mandatory budget levels unlikely to fly (at least 10% on higher education and no more than 7% on prisons). Even Schwarzenegger himself has argued against this kind of "autopilot budgeting" in the past.

The trick to fixing a state criminal justice system isn't only cutting dollars from the budgets, it's how you cut. The details of the governor's plan make this point for me. He wants to save money through privatization of facilities and health care services, the most nearsighted and ineffective approach possible.

California's prisons are overcrowded and under-serviced. Three-strikes laws and hair-trigger probation rules have stuffed cells (and gyms, cafeterias and portable trailers) with bunk beds stacked three high. Schwarzenegger and state officials have fought a federal court ruling to reduce the state's prison population by 40% in order to ensure that prisoners receive adequate health care.

Instead of addressing these systemic problems by helping nonviolent offenders avoid incarceration, the governor said in his speech Wednesday that he would take on the state's powerful corrections union and seek to privatize some new facilities and state services, such as health care. I'm no big fan of the corrections union -- fighting for exorbitant overtime pay also doesn't represent smart prison reform. But privatizing prisons is even worse. Private facilities trade safety and prisoners' rights for the bottom line and cutting the cost per prisoner doesn't represent real sustainable reform.

California needs to fix its courts and prisons from top to bottom, and shifting facilities to private control won't achieve this. Yes, Gov. Schwarzenegger is right that the state's priorities are out of whack when it spends 11% of its money on prisons and 7.5% on higher education, and he deserves our praise for giving this issue the attention it deserves.

Unfortunately, his plan to fix the problem is way off base.

Photo of budget protests at UC Berkeley in November by James Buck