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Sacramento Bee
HEADLINE: Editorial: Reject It - Now - Governor's Prison Plan Would Worsen Crisis

DATE: August 7, 2006

This is the last in a series of four editorials on the special session on prisons.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called California's legislators into special session to make the state's broken prison system bigger. The Legislature should waste no time rejecting this approach.

Building more prisons won't fix the system's problems, but it will be a big boost for one group: the prison guards union, known as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

Back in January, the CCPOA came to the Legislature with a plan for two new prisons in 2006 and two more in 2010. Schwarzenegger essentially has adopted this plan -- and expanded it. The governor wants to build two new prisons (9,000 beds) and add 15,000 new beds to existing prisons.

Worse, he wants to require community corrections facilities run by counties, cities and private companies to have state prison guards as custody staff. This change would make these programs prohibitively expensive. It also would ruin the emphasis on education, vocational training and addiction programs to prepare Level I and II minimum-security inmates for life on the outside.

Worse still, Schwarzenegger wants to build 10 re-entry miniprisons (500 beds each) for parole violators and inmates serving their last 90 days. These would be state-run and staffed by state prison guards. This is a major shift away from contracting for locally run re-entry centers housing about 50 offenders each.

Schwarzenegger's plan isn't just about bonds for new bricks and mortar. It's about piling up long-term costs for state taxpayers.

If you add 10,000 new CCPOA prison guards -- not just at new state prisons but also at community corrections facilities and new miniprisons -- you have to figure costs of $100,000 a year each (salary, benefits and overtime). That alone adds $1 billion a year in new costs to already out-of-control prison budgets.

The governor's plan is a bonanza for the guards union, but it does nothing to deal with the real issue.

California's state prison system was intended and designed to house violent, repeat offenders serving long terms. Yet increasingly it has become filled with lower-level, nonviolent offenders serving sentences of a year or less -- prisoners who used to be handled at the local level.

Here's an example of how wrong things have gone. Today, 9,000 Level I minimum security prisoners are serving time in Level IV, maximum security housing. This is like a hospital putting people with a mild case of the flu in intensive care beds. It is outrageously expensive and utterly unnecessary.

As we've noted in editorials over the past three days, the key to fixing overcrowded prisons and out-of-control prison budgets is changing the way California handles low-level, nonviolent offenders. And the first step to that is to restore the balance between the state and local corrections responsibilities.

The governor's plan doesn't do that. Instead, it will make the problem worse and the eventual solutions more difficult. If lawmakers are serious about getting control of the state's prison system, the governor's plan should be dead on arrival.

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