Proposed Cuts for Probation
The Times is to be commended for its June 15 editorial (“Probation: Wrong Place to Cut”) on the impact of projected cuts in the County Probation Department’s budget. There is no question that the almost $16 million in spending reductions proposed for the department will sharply reduce its ability to monitor the thousands of former prisoners living in Los Angeles County.
It is particularly frustrating for me that these cuts are coming at a time when we are spending millions of dollars to build new prisons to relieve the severe overcrowding at our present facilities. It costs roughly $50,000 per bed to build a new prison. The Probation Department’s most expensive project, the Intensive Surveillance Program, costs about one-fifth as much. California’s penal system is heading in the high-priced direction of spending vast sums to warehouse prisoners and very little to supervise them once they are released on probation. This is bad legal policy, bad fiscal policy and bad prisoner management policy.
As a county supervisor, I would like to do something to correct this imbalance. The problem locally is we just do not have the money. The Times editorializes that the Board of Supervisors “must find the money somewhere.” That is a simple--but not an easy--answer. The simple part of it is that money exists to restore the funding cuts in the Probation Department. The hard part is the state, not the county, has the money.
That money is part of the $700 million Gov. George Deukmejian insists be rebated to California taxpayers. Under the governor’s plan, the average rebate to an individual taxpayer would be around $50. Gov. Deukmejian seems determined to rebate the state surplus rather than spend it where it is desperately needed for local school and law enforcement programs like the Probation Department. Maybe a tax rebate has short range political appeal to the person who winds up with a $50 tax credit. But that same person is hardly likely to brim over with gratitude if he has to pay hundreds of dollars in medical bills after being mugged by a former convict out on probation who wasn’t monitored closely enough because Los Angeles County didn’t have the money to do the job.
EDMUND D. EDELMAN
Supervisor
Third District