WOODLAND HILLS : Hayden Addresses Students at Pierce

Stumping for the Democratic nomination for governor, state Sen. Tom Hayden on Wednesday told about 150 Pierce College students and faculty that California should spend more on higher education and less on prisons.

“For the first time in California history, we are spending more money on incarceration than on higher education,” the Santa Monica legislator told the noontime audience.

“We are not safer in the long run if we turn ourselves into a penal colony . . . ,” he said. “We have swung so far over to the punishment side that the punishment budget is devouring funds for prevention.”

It was a sympathetic audience for Hayden, who has championed environmental, education and other causes popular with students since his days as a student radical in the 1960s.

To the agreeing nods of many students, Hayden called the trustees and regents of California’s higher education system “narrow-minded people” who obey the fiscal wishes of the governor, who appoints them.

Last year, the state raised fees at community colleges from $10 to $13 per unit and eliminated the cap on the amount students would be required to pay. Hayden said he would roll back those increases, if elected.

Hayden surprised the Democratic establishment a month and a half ago by announcing his candidacy as a “messenger” for reform in Sacramento.

He said he would withdraw from the race before the March 11 filing deadline if the other Democratic candidates, Treasurer Kathleen Brown and Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, adopted parts of his platform with sufficient zeal.

They did not.

Top among Hayden’s priorities is changing the “totally dysfunctional” way lobbyists and legislators spend “night and day” together.

“Every night in Sacramento there’s a fund-raiser,” Hayden told the Pierce students, “where the lobbyists come; they drink wine; they nosh on a gourmet hot dog; they give a check to a politician; they go home. The next morning they go to a hearing, and at the hearing they ask the same politician to vote their way.”