"ONE NIGHT ONLY!"
Words.
"California had a prison crisis long before this year's budget crisis. A system designed for fewer than 100,000 inmates is crammed with about 170,000. The overcrowding has made prison conditions so miserable, especially when it comes to medical care, that federal judges have ruled that the state is violating inmates' constitutional rights. As a result, the prison health system is under the oversight of a federal receiver, and a three-judge panel might soon order steep cuts in the inmate population.
...California has taken much sentencing discretion away from judges, forcing them to set terms based on a schedule of crimes and enhancements. Most inmates serve their full terms, and all are placed on parole for three years. This system fails to classify convicts based on the danger they pose to the public. The prisons are stuffed with nonviolent offenders, and parole officers' caseloads are enormous, making it very hard to focus attention on truly high-risk individuals. This is the only state to combine determinate sentencing with such a rigorous parole system, and it's not coincidental that it has the nation's highest recidivism rate.
The folly of these and other state corrections policies has been clear for more than a decade. Experts have filed studies and reports by the dozen identifying solutions to the overcrowding crisis, yet they've been ignored by politicians worried that fixing the prisons might be seen by voters as coddling criminals. If there's one good outcome from California's budget woes, it's that they might force lawmakers to institute reforms that should have happened years ago.
...Housing inmates isn't cheap, and it's inconsistent to pass laws that cram the prisons while turning down measures to pay for them."
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