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Townhall...
Soft-on-Crime Cycle
Repeats
By Debra J. Saunders
The good news: Last year, California’s homicide rate dropped to its
lowest level since 1966. Violent crimes were down from the year before.
The bad news: Federal judges and California lawmakers juggling to run a
state government despite a huge budget deficit are making decisions
that threaten to dismantle a system that has made California a safer
place to live. If they get their way, today’s state prison population
of 162,000 inmates could drop by more than 40,000 within two years.
Are you afraid yet?
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 2009 three-judge panel
ruling that ordered California to reduce its prison population by some
33,000 inmates in two years to alleviate overcrowding. The problem: No
one elected the federal judges, yet they seem to think they are
lawmakers. The three judges ignored improvements in prison medical and
mental health care -- the basis for the Plata and Coleman lawsuits that
spawned the decision -- and then decided that the remedy for poor
services in the past is to reduce the prison population in the future.
The state already had begun reducing the number of inmates -- by 11,000
inmates over five years -- with changes to the parole system. In
addition, Gov. Jerry Brown has been pushing for a plan to transfer some
offenders to county jails -- which should cut the state prison
population by 35,000.
It may look like a wash, but it isn’t.
Corrections chief Matt Cate noted there are many “unknowns.” What if a
lawsuit stops the construction of the Stockton medical facility? The
Plata decision “reduces our flexibility.”
The biggest “unknown,” you should know, is that the Legislature hasn’t
passed a bill to fund Brown’s plan to shift some costs and services to
local government. As the spokeswoman for Assembly GOP Leader Connie
Conway explained, Republicans think the measure “puts public safety at
risk.” Conway looks at Fresno, where car thieves are let out of jail
within days of their arrest, and she sees a recipe for more crime.
Before this Supreme Court ruling, Republican lawmakers feared that the
Brown plan would put low-level -- and some not-so-low-level --
offenders out on the street.
With the Plata decision, however, the Brown plan has a new wrinkle. The
three judges’ order involves 33 state prisons. The Brown plan would
transfer jurisdiction for some 9,000 low-level offenders heretofore
housed in conservation camps and out-of-state contracted facilities.
Add the two together and you get: 42,000 inmates, 33,000 of whom
violated their way into the big house.
Before the ruling, the state corrections department had begun canceling
contracts for the 9,800 inmates housed out of state and had budgeted
for only half those slots. Cate told me Thursday that the
administration is reconsidering that decision -- and can quickly change
course. May I suggest? Do so, pronto.
“I don’t think you should assume that the administration will decide to
let out anybody,” Cate admonished.
But there are two forces that shout otherwise.
One: The state is broke. Teachers, welfare workers and government-aid
recipients look at the $9 billion corrections budget and think they
could spend the money better. The state spends close to $50,000 per
inmate because prison staff is well paid and federal judges have
ordered health care improvements that boosted the tab for health care
to $14,000 per inmate per year. Counties and cities have had to lay off
law enforcement officers, and Brown promises pay local government about
half as much as the “$50,000 scholarships” to take inmates off the
state’s hands.
Two: There’s the big liberal lie that California’s 1994 three-strikes
law has bloated state prisons with pizza thieves and pot smokers. In
fact, the state’s incarceration rate -- 456 inmates per 100,000
residents -- is slightly above the national average of 432 per 100,000.
In 2009, 55 percent of state inmates had been convicted of violent or
sexual crimes, 20 percent were in for property crimes like burglary and
car theft. The rest were convicted for drug dealing, weapons charges,
drunken driving and other charges. About 10,000 males were serving time
for drug possession. You can figure most had serious priors and were
housed in the cheap seats.
Even law-and-order types understand that the system must be
streamlined. Nina Salarno Ashford of Crime Victims United told me, “I
understand budget constraints.” For example, parole violators should go
to jail -- not prison. But Salarno looks at overcrowded jails, which
already have had to release inmates, and fears the consequences.
How do you pay for it?
“It is probably going to take taxes,” she answered.
No lie. There is not much point in keeping taxes low -- only to have
some lowlife boost your wallet.
On the other hand, there’s not much point in paying higher taxes if the
state slashes the number of inmates by 40,000 or more.
California has been down this road before. In the 1970s, indeterminate
sentences led to soft sentences for violent offenders. The public
demanded tougher laws and the crime rate dropped. Now that these laws
have paid off, Brown and the Democratic Legislature want to cut off
their legs.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in its wisdom, actually argued that three
federal judges were right to conclude that releasing thousands of
inmates won’t significantly increase crime and “could even improve
public safety.”
Justice Anthony Kennedy just restarted the cycle: soft law, doomed to
be followed by brutal crime, which will be followed by harsh remedies.
He has no idea what he has done.
Read it at Townhall
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