Prison system mess isn't getting better
http://www.sacbee (http://www.sacbee/). com/111/story/ 1254619.html
By Dan Walters - dwalters@sacbee. com
Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, September 22, 2008
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A3
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The state's budget imbroglio had many casualties, and a big one was doing something about the festering mess we call a prison system.
We have more than 170,000 inmates in cells designed for scarcely half that number, inmate health care is so bad that a federal judge has seized control, his receiver is demanding $8 billion from a state that's already hemorrhaging red ink, other judges are threatening to take over other aspects of the system, and the prison guards union is mounting a recall campaign against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger because of long-stalled contract negotiations.
As the Legislature conjured up a budget last week that Schwarzenegger threatened to veto and later accepted, a budget "trailer bill" that would have spent billions of dollars in bond funds to satisfy the health care receiver stalled. Republicans nonsensically refused to vote for it because of an obscure provision of another measure allowing some prisoners to earn earlier release by attending school.
Just hours after the bill died, Attorney General Jerry Brown asked the federal judge who seized control of the system to reject receiver J. Clark Kelso's request for $8 billion to build new medical facilities. Without the legislation, Kelso wants to tap the state treasury directly for the money. He is asking his boss, Judge Thelton Henderson, to hold Schwarzenegger and other officials in contempt if they don't provide it.
What a mess – and it could get even worse if the rest of the prison system is taken over by the courts and judges start ordering inmate releases to ease overcrowding.
As if that wasn't enough, there's also a simmering controversy over whether the state should spend $400 million to build a new facility – in essence, a separate prison – at San Quentin to relieve overcrowding on death row. Although California reinstated the death penalty more than three decades ago – by a Legislature that overrode then-Gov. Brown's veto – it has executed just 14 murderers since then and has nearly 700 condemned inmates, most of whom are housed at San Quentin on San Francisco Bay.
San Quentin should have been razed decades ago, its extremely valuable land sold and new facilities, including a new death row, built elsewhere. Instead, San Quentin continues to house thounited snakesnds of inmates, including those condemned to die if they don't succumb to old age first.
Costs of the new death row have ballooned to nearly $400,000 per cell. The project has been the subject of withering criticism by state budget analysts and auditors. Marin County authorities, meanwhile, want the death row site for a parklike commuter ferry terminal.
Democrats slashed the death row project from their version of the budget, but the Governor's Office got it reinstated in the version that passed both houses early Tuesday and was sent to Schwarzenegger for a signature.
If the prisons are a mess, they are more than matched by the politics of prisons.