Prison inmates are down, but costs still going up

May 21, 2018 By Dan Walters 5 Comments

Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies inspect a cell block at the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca says he plans to implement all the reforms suggested by a commission in the wake of allegations that a culture of violence flourished in his jails. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)

When Jerry Brown’s first governorship began in 1975, California had about 20,000 men and women behind bars in its prison system, but that number would increase more than eight-fold.

As crime rates rose to record levels in the 1970s, Brown, the Legislature and voters responded with laws creating new crimes and/or increasing prison terms for old offenses. Those laws, more that were added in the 1980s and 1990s and more unforgiving attitudes by prosecutors and judges, triggered a flood of new prison inmates.

Democrat Brown and his Republican successors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, undertook a massive prison construction program that eventually added 23 new human warehouses.

By 1990, the state’s prison population had quintupled to 100,000 and by the time Brown returned to the governorship in 2011, it had reached 162,000, just slightly below its peak.

Since then, however, it has declined sharply to a current 129,000, thanks to federal court orders attacking prison overcrowding, more lenient attitudes on parole and probation, diversion of some low-level felons into county jails, and two ballot measures – one sponsored by Brown himself – that reduced penalties.

Some law enforcement authorities contend that California’s penal pendulum has swung too far, and that having fewer miscreants locked up and more on the streets is sparking a new surge of crime.

Voters could weigh in on the issue under a proposed ballot measure that would restore harsher penalties for some crimes, even as the Legislature considers bills to lighten sentences even more.

One might expect that with prison populations having dropped by about 25 percent, costs would also have decreased.

Not so. In fact, they have continued to increase, and with fewer felons behind bars, the per-inmate cost has skyrocketed to about $75,000 a year, roughly the price of a Stanford University education and more than twice the national average.

Brown’s budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year pegs state prison and parole costs at $12 billion. But that’s not the total cost because one of the steps to reduce overcrowding was to shift more felons into county jails and probation programs, with money – $2 billion currently – to pay for them.

That $14 billion is only slightly less than what taxpayers spend through the state budget on higher education. But why, one might wonder, did costs escalate as the number of inmates declined?

The biggest reason is that the system is still housing more inmates than its designed capacity and, therefore, no prisons have been closed. Fundamental operating costs, including the number of prison guards and their ever-increasing salaries and fringe benefits, especially pensions, are unaffected.

Another big factor is that – also thanks to federal court orders – prison health care costs have exploded to $20,000 per inmate. That’s by far the highest in the nation, nearly four times the national average, and also roughly twice the average cost of health care for Californians not behind bars.

The future is cloudy. Under the more lenient laws and policies in effect now, inmate populations may decline slowly, perhaps to the point at which some prisons could be shuttered.

However, prison unions and the communities that see their prisons as economic boons will resist closures. And if the pending ballot measure on sentencing passes, the inmate decline could be stopped.

As the last four decades have shown, what we euphemistically call “criminal justice” is ultimately just another political issue that, like others, is subject to the whims of voters and politicians.

This article was originally published by CalMatters.org

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Guess who pays if Obama’s plan to defer deportations is upheld

February 10, 2016 By Susan Shelley 2 Comments

Immigration ObamaBy the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether President Obama really has the power to defer the deportation of 4 million people who are in the United States illegally.

The justices have agreed to hear the case of United States v. Texas, in which 26 states are suing the federal government to stop the president’s deferral policy from going forward.

The first issue to be decided is whether the states have “standing” to sue. They’ll have to show that they are harmed by the president’s actions.

Former California Gov. Pete Wilson says there’s no doubt about it.

“The states continue to feel the heavy impacts and the very high costs of federal failure to deal rationally and adequately with immigration policy,” Wilson told a meeting of the Federalist Society recently at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

In 1994, Wilson said, California spent “more than $3 billion, or 7 percent of the entire state operating budget” to provide health care and education to illegal immigrants and to incarcerate alien felons.

Wilson unsuccessfully sued the federal government to recover the costs that state taxpayers were bearing. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected all his arguments, even the claim that the federal government ought to pay the costs of incarcerating criminals who should have been stopped at the border.

The court said, “California can simply exercise discretion not to prosecute and imprison alien felons and thus not incur the expense,” Wilson recalled sardonically.

No discretion is allowed in education. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that states must provide free public education to all children, regardless of immigration status.

Wilson said one reason he backed Proposition 187 — the 1994 ballot measure that prohibited state funding of public benefits for undocumented California residents — was that he wanted to challenge the Plyler ruling.

“I was convinced that if we could get 187 before a notably less liberal Supreme Court a decade later, there was a good chance that the court would overturn Plyler,” Wilson said, describing it as a “weak” 5-4 decision. But because of a long delay in the lower court, time ran out for Wilson, and his successor, Gov. Gray Davis, dropped the appeal.

“The people of California were cheated of their day in the Supreme Court,” Wilson said.

Today, the cost of illegal immigration is embedded in state and local budgets.

In 2014, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $61 million program called My Health L.A. to provide free medical care to undocumented immigrants ineligible for Obamacare.

California’s new system of distributing education money, the Local Control Funding Formula, gives more money to districts with high concentrations of students classified as “English learners.” The LCFF replaced a system that provided “categorical funding” for specific programs, including the arts and music block grant, gifted and talented education, and the school safety block grant.

Californians will pay $132 million a year for a new state law that provides free health coverage to undocumented residents under the age of 19.

And if Obama prevails in the Supreme Court, California may feel it in the Medi-Cal program, which already serves 13.5 million people. The state has considered deferred immigration status to be a category eligible for full Medi-Cal coverage.

However, the outcome of this case is completely unpredictable. What happens if the court upholds the president’s use of executive orders to change immigration policy, and Donald Trump is elected president?

Maybe the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the law of unintended consequences.

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Trump Ad Echoes Campaign for CA Prop. 187

January 13, 2016 By Susan Shelley 2 Comments

Donald Trump political adDonald Trump’s first TV ad of the 2016 campaign isn’t airing in California, but the images are very familiar to Californians.

The ad begins with a warning about radical Islamic terrorism, with photos of the two San Bernardino shooters over a background of flashing emergency lights and a sheet-covered body. Next, the announcer promises that Trump will “stop illegal immigration,” and the video cuts to grainy black-and-white footage of immigrants racing on foot to cross the border.

That clip is actually from Morocco, but if you lived in California in 1994, you probably remember the original version of this ad, with its grainy black-and-white footage of immigrants racing on foot to cross the border, running between the cars on Interstate 5.

“They keep coming,” the announcer said somberly in that campaign ad for Gov. Pete Wilson’s re-election. “Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.”

Also on the ballot that year was Proposition 187, which would have cut off public benefits, including education and health care, to everyone in California who was residing in the country illegally.

Pete Wilson won that election with 55 percent of the vote, and Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent.

Later, Prop. 187 was thrown out by a federal court and Wilson was widely blamed by political experts for turning a generation of Latino voters away from the Republican Party. But that’s not proof that voters feel differently today than they did in 1994.

Will Trump’s message resonate with a majority of voters in California or repel them? Let’s crunch the numbers from the 1994 vote for Prop. 187 and see if we can find the answer.

We’ll start by asking, “Who voted for Prop. 187?” According to an average of exit polls, 40 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of voters registered as independent or other.

At that time, statewide voter registration in California was 49 percent Democrat, 37 percent Republican, and 14 percent independent or other party. Today, the numbers are 43 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 29 percent independent or other.

How would a vote on Prop. 187 come out today if the 1994 exit poll percentages were applied to California’s current voter registration by party?

It would pass, 56 percent to 44 percent, assuming equal turnout across the board. It’s a guessing game to predict which party’s voters would be more energized to turn out, and whether that would change the outcome. It probably wouldn’t.

Like the voter registration statistics, the demographics of California have changed.

The 1994 exit polls estimated the ethnic/racial composition of the electorate as 78 percent non-Hispanic white, 9 percent Latino, 7 percent black and 6 percent Asian.

Who voted for Prop. 187? Sixty-four percent of non-Hispanic whites, 52 percent of both blacks and Asians, and 27 percent of Latinos.

The Public Policy Institute of California projects that in 2016, 60 percent of the state’s likely voters will be white, 18 percent Latino, 6 percent black, 12 percent Asian, and 4 percent multi-racial or other.

If each group voted as it did in 1994, Prop 187 would pass by a margin of 53 percent to 43 percent. Adding the 4 percent of voters in the more recent multi-racial category to either side won’t change the result.

There’s one more question. Have attitudes and views in this state changed so dramatically since 1994 that exit polls from that election are now irrelevant and meaningless? Maybe. But a different conclusion can’t be ruled out:

Donald Trump could carry California.

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A One-Two Punch Against the Initiative Process at the Supreme Court

January 28, 2015 By Joel Fox 2 Comments

An Arizona case before the U.S. Supreme Court that challenges the state’s ballot initiative created redistricting commission could have such an effect on California politics that three former California governors, noted California political scientists, and a California state commission have all filed briefs in the case.

California voters also approved ballot measures that took the power to draw district lines away from the legislature and gave it to an independent commission. Proposition 11 in 2008 created the Commission to draw state legislative districts, Proposition 20 in 2010 allowed the commission to draw congressional districts. If the Arizona legislature were successful in court banning the commission more than the redistricting commissions would fall. Ultimately, the entire initiative process could be endangered.

The Arizona legislature is counting on the court to take Article 1 Section 4 of the United States Constitution at face value, that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

In other words, only the legislature itself can create district lines, lawyers for the legislature claim. Reform movements in the Grand Canyon State and the Golden State rebelled against this authority arguing that legislators have a conflict of interest in setting up legislative districts, rigging the system and drawing districts that often resemble modern art paintings all in an effort to assure sitting legislators re-elections or maintaining the ruling party in power.

The court must decide if legislative power resides only with elected legislators. In the brief filed on behalf of former California governors George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the definition of “legislature” is taken from Samuel Johnson’s famous 1755 dictionary to mean “[t]he power that makes laws.” The brief argues that congressional redistricting can be undertaken “by whatever lawmaking body the people of a State decide to vest with that power.”

The California Citizens Redistricting Commission brief reminds the court that in the state constitution, “All political power is inherent in the people.” Through the initiative process in California and Arizona, “both the people of the state and the elected state representatives are lawmaking bodies, both constitute the “Legislature” for purposes of the Elections Clause.”

Not just the power to redistrict is in jeopardy if the Supreme Court sides with the Arizona legislators say California political scientists at Stanford and UC Irvine in their brief. Other election reforms including California’s open primary and even direct primaries themselves may be in peril.

Take it one step further and a ruling by the Supreme Court striking down the power of initiative to supplant the legislature in redistricting just might open the door for the Supreme Court to consider a challenge to the initiative process itself.

Such a challenge is slowly working its way in the federal courts out of Colorado.

Former Colorado legislators argue in Kerr vs. Hickenlooper that the U.S. Constitution’s clause guaranteeing states a Republican form of government is violated by giving power to the people to make laws, and specifically in the Colorado instance, to vote on tax measures.

Attempting to undercut the initiative process by arguing that measures put on the ballot by the people violates the U. S. Constitution is as old as direct democracy in this country. In 1912, a telephone company in Oregon used the argument to challenge a tax imposed by voters. The court determined then, as it had in previous dealings with the Guarantee Clause going back as early as 1849, that what constitutes a Republican Form of Government is a political question.

Many legal experts thought the Colorado case would be dismissed because the issue was non-justiciable—meaning an issue over which the court cannot exercise its judicial authority. However, the Tenth Circuit Court agreed to allow the case to proceed although the defenders of the initiative are asking the Supreme Court to review that decision.

The way the people of California have chosen to govern themselves will be tested by these Supreme Court rulings dealing first with the Election Clause, and, perhaps, ultimately, the Guarantee Clause of the United States Constitution.

Joel Fox is the editor of Fox & Hounds and President of the Small Business Action Committee

Originally published on Fox and Hounds Daily

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