Jerry Brown's California budget slashes $1 billion from prisons [View all]

[SixthSense]

Gov. Jerry Brown wants to cut state prison spending by a billion dollars in the next fiscal year — mostly by cutting staff. Prison officials say they won’t need as many employees because the number of prisoners they oversee is dropping fast — the state has 11,000 fewer inmates since California’s “realignment” law took effect in October. The law diverts low-level felons to county jails. The state this week met its first court-ordered benchmark for reducing the prison population.

California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations is changing and rearranging and shrinking, as realignment drives the prison population down.

"We see the churning of inmates has stopped, great reductions in our total number of inmates already," Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/01/07/30706/jerry-browns-california-budget-slashes-1-billion-p/