The Penal State of California : Corrections: We could switch millions to education.

Amid the pandering and the politicking around the “three strikes and you’re out” legislation, California’s Department of Corrections emerged unscathed once again from the budget ax.

Corrections has received increases averaging $239 million per year for every year over the past decade. During that time, the Corrections budget has increased at twice the rate of the budgets for Health and Welfare, Education or the General Fund. Fiscal conservatives and tax-and-spend liberals alike have refused to touch Corrections’ astonishing $400-million administrative salaries. Over the past decade, substantially more employees were added to Corrections (26,000) than all other state departments combined (16,000). Higher education actually experienced a reduction in work force of more than 8,000 employees during this time.

“Three strikes and you’re out” notwithstanding, several very workable cuts to Corrections have received preliminary approval from the Legislature. Unfortunately, both Gov. Pete Wilson and Democratic gubernatorial challenger Kathleen Brown have rejected them.

One is to eliminate costly and ineffective parole supervision for non-serious offenders. Parole officers have long been overburdened. Little in the way of meaningful rehabilitation can occur in the relationship between one parole officer and more than 75 extremely troubled, often impoverished, often substance-abusing parolees.

Rather than abolish supervision for all parolees, this proposal selects those whom Californians fear the least--the nonviolent ones who are not drug dealers. As modest as that sounds, this suggestion would save $45 million in the next fiscal year alone, and more in subsequent years.

Another sensible cut to Corrections would involve abolishing the state’s antiquated “petty theft with a prior” law for defendants whose prior offense was nonviolent. The “petty with a prior” law is California’s “steal two loaves of bread, go to prison.” A first conviction for shoplifting is a misdemeanor, but the second such conviction is a felony allowing for a state prison sentence.

Today, California imprisons about 4,500 prisoners for “petty with a prior,” more than twice as many as for rape. That practice alone cost taxpayers $95 million last year. Each of those prisoners would have had to commit 53 petty thefts in order to collectively steal $95 million. Abolishing the “petty with a prior” law for defendants with nonviolent priors would save $14.2 million next year, and more in ensuing years.

Because of overloaded courts, pretrial delays for defendants sent to state prison have doubled. Since they serve so much jail time before they are sentenced, more than one-quarter of all admissions to California’s prisons spend less than six months actually in prison. Rather than school short-term, nonviolent inmates in the ways of the “big house,” the state should place them on intensively supervised parole. If properly designed, intensive supervision has been shown to actually reduce rearrests for parolees. This proposal would save $5.5 million.

Finally, because sending juvenile offenders to the California Youth Authority costs counties only $25 per month per child, there is a financial incentive for counties to commit even low-level youthful offenders to our state’s juvenile prison system. Once there, many learn more about criminal behavior their first week than they could have in years in the community.

Increasing the charge to counties would hold them accountable for sending lightweight youth to California’s juvenile “gladiator schools.” Right now, the county with the highest commitment rate commits kids at eight times the rate of the county with the lowest commitment rate, per capita. Still, both counties pay the same taxes for the system. This modest proposal would save $66 million next year.

In total, reducing the state’s nonviolent prisoner population and its correctional bureaucracy would save $266 million in 1994-95, and more in ensuing years.

Ten years ago, the higher education budget was 2 1/2 times the corrections budget. This year, the two are equal for the first time. California has the highest juvenile incarceration rate in the nation, twice the national average. We also have the second-worst school class size in the country. We spend $97,000 to build one prison cell, $21,000 to incarcerate one prisoner, but only $4,000 to educate one child. California could obviously make better use of $266 million than by imprisoning our least-serious offenders and funding a bloated bureaucracy.

While these cuts to corrections are no panacea, they begin to take prisons off of the fiscal pedestal they have occupied for the past decade and to make the sensible and safe fiscal choices required in this era of austerity. The governor would do well to cut Corrections’ waste as he would any other department, and not play politics with the prison budget.