Unlocking Prison Reforms

The state’s official watchdog agency, the Little Hoover Commission, has two weeks to recommend whether legislators should accept or reject the Schwarzenegger administration’s proposals for prison reforms, and the commissioners seem nowhere near agreement.

A meeting two weeks ago opened with a commissioner praising the plan for being “certainly on the right track.” But after hearing witnesses describe its many holes, he denounced it as “the greatest hoax I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

The quotes may sound confused, but both observations are true. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan is on the right track in recognizing failures in the prison system that his predecessors ignored, but his laggard implementation schedule may allow special interests, particularly the prison guards union, to defeat its reforms.

The plan identifies the system’s key failing: that 79% of inmates return to prison after release. One big reason is that the state fails to provide counseling, job training and other “community reentry programs” that have significantly lowered recidivism in other states. Schwarzenegger, though, doesn’t plan to begin new reentry programs until 2007.

The Schwarzenegger plan also acknowledges bureaucratic sloth and inefficiencies that make the state’s prisons costlier than necessary. One is healthcare, which the plan describes as “deliberately indifferent,” leading not only to untreated illness but to lawsuits and huge negligence payouts. The proposed solution is to “consider” an independent healthcare provider, but not until 2010.

Most frustrating of all is the governor’s insistence that the state dillydally until July 2007 on public measurement of both spending efficiency and program performance. The prisons ought to be measured at least as thoroughly as the public schools, given the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to keep a prisoner for a year, and the danger posed by warehousing, in brutal conditions, people who will eventually be released to the streets. The Little Hoover Commission should press Schwarzenegger for some speed.

Even with the plan’s major flaws, we hope the commission will offer overall approval. The alternative -- disappearance into the Legislature’s perpetual gridlock -- would be worse.

The Legislature’s top prison reform advocates, state Sens. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) and Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), have savaged the plan for its loopholes and delays. Speier and Romero also see a failure to adequately reform the California Youth Authority. The reformers would do more good by getting legislators to separately address such legitimate concerns.

Technically, the commission can’t compel legislators or the governor to do anything. But right now it is the only adult on the block.