Criminal neglect

California on Monday earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first state to face a federally imposed cap on its overflowing prison population. Combine this with an ongoing stalemate on the six-weeks-overdue budget, and it seems our lawmakers are setting new national standards of incompetence.

Failed prison policies are a bipartisan phenomenon, but most of the blame for the current fiasco goes to Republicans in the Legislature, whose refusal to consider sentencing and parole reforms prompted Monday’s ruling. The minority party’s shortsighted obstructionism isn’t just contributing to the overcrowding problem, it’s a violation of the GOP’s core principles.

Two federal judges Monday ordered the creation of a judicial panel to consider a prison population cap. California has 173,000 inmates living in space built for 100,000 and, with a 70% recidivism rate, has more inmates returning to prison than any other state. The response by the Legislature to the looming federal cap was to pass a bill in May calling for a massive prison construction program paid for with $7.4 billion in bonds. Omitted from the bill at Republican insistence were proposals to create a commission to reconsider the state’s overly punitive sentencing rules, as well as reforms to a parole system that sends thousands of nonviolent offenders back to prison every year.

Tough-on-crime GOP lawmakers are unwilling to consider steps that might lessen criminal sentences. By their own criterion, then, they have failed miserably: A population cap threatens to impose precisely the early releases they were trying to avoid. Further, by voting to spend billions on new prisons without taking meaningful steps to reduce the prison population and thus cut costs, Republicans have abandoned any pretense of being the party of fiscal responsibility.

The judges were unimpressed with the state’s prison bill, not least because it does nothing to increase staffing even as it would add 53,000 beds to the system. This is precisely the mistake L.A. County made when it spent $373 million to build the Twin Towers jail but didn’t come up with a plan for paying guards and other staff. Thus the facility sat empty for years after opening in 1995 because the county couldn’t afford to operate it.

Appointing judges to fix California’s prisons is undemocratic, but we can think of a democratic solution: Throw out the bungling lawmakers who brought the state to this sad point.