Imprisoned by Oversimplification

The state Senate is to be forgiven for its enthusiastic embrace last week of a bill that would curb the soaring costs of state prisons by paying county sheriffs to keep nonviolent felony offenders in their jails. The bill could relieve some of the pressure the “three-strikes” law is placing on the state prison system.

But while the measure makes sense on its merits, implementation would be problematic. Further, this bill, authored by Senate President Pro Tempore Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), is more like a “triage” bill for an overextended criminal justice system than a real help. As such, SB 760 is emblematic of the Legislature’s continuing inability to confront the hard choices that inevitably result from facile political solutions like the “three-strikes” law.

California now spends about 8% of general fund revenues on an expanding network of prisons. Under the year-old “three-strikes” law aimed at repeat offenders, the state’s prison population--at 126,000 inmates the largest in the nation--is expected to soar. To keep up, the state Department of Corrections estimates it must add at least 15 new prisons in the next five years to house 80,000 new convicts. The cost of this expansion will force unbearable trade-offs.

Lockyer’s bill, which now moves to the Assembly, could provide some short-term relief. It would allow the state to pay counties about $650 million a year to house nonviolent felons who otherwise would be sent to state prisons--expensive facilities that would be reserved for more dangerous inmates serving longer sentences.

Some county sheriffs are concerned that under SB 760 they could be burdened with even more inmates than their already crowded jails can accommodate. Indeed, implementation would involve voters’ passage of a bond issue to provide construction funds for local jail facilities.

The real problem, of course, is with the broad net cast by the “three-strikes” law, which imposes a sentence of 25 years to life for conviction of virtually any third felony, from premeditated murder to passing bad checks. Lockyer’s bill may allow the state some flexibility in housing the least dangerous of these convicts. How much wiser it would have been to have left flexibility with judges in sentencing those felons.