A California Bold Move:: From prison to jail

[housewolf]

From prison to jail
California has embarked on a reform that might keep more people out of prison

MIRED in fiscal crisis and usually deemed dysfunctional, California under Governor Jerry Brown has nonetheless surprised itself this year with one big reform. Starting this month, it has begun to send people newly convicted of crimes that are non-violent, non-sexual and non-serious, or “non3” in the jargon, to jails, which are run by county sheriffs (and are normally used as pre-sentencing holding pens), instead of prisons, run by the state. This is part of what Mr Brown calls “realignment”, a devolution from centralised to local power. But it goes further: these reforms amount to a rethinking of California’s, and America’s, disastrous three-decade run of “tough-on-crime” fallacies.

That legacy of locking up ever more people for more reasons and more time led to a prison-building boom in the 1980s (California now has 33, not counting “camps”), an explosion of inmate numbers in the 1990s and a corresponding increase in cost to taxpayers. Prison spending went from about 4% of the state budget in the mid-1980s to about 10% now; it exceeds university funding. Inside the prisons, this means inhumane overcrowding. A federal ruling, upheld by the Supreme Court in May, has found the conditions “cruel and unusual”, and requires California to release roughly 30,000 inmates in the next two years.
In this section

The realignment reforms could, at least in part, address all of these problems. That is because they do not merely shift the same number of inmates with the same problems and costs from one level of government to another. Rather, the new system assumes that counties will do differently and better what the state does badly.

Read more:
http://www.economist.com/node/21531490?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/fromprisontojail

[grasswire]

1. California once had a school system that was the envy of the world.

Then it diverted all the money from schools to prisons. Follow the dollar. There's immense profit to be made from prison construction and custody. Schools? Not so much.

[tularetom]

2. Our sheriff is already whining that he doesn't have room for them

This seems to me like a step in the right direction (toward rehabilitation away from incarceration) but in the meantime all it does is transfer the costs of housing these prisoners from the state to the already strapped counties. With no financial help from the state it's just another example of an unfunded mandate, or shit rolling downhill.

However nothing will change until the taxpayers wake up and realize how much of their money is being wasted to keep people in jail for things like possession of weed, non payment of child support and other non violent offenses.