CSUN University News Clippings

Delay in prison decision rescues California budget deal

(July 23, 2009)

By Steve Wiegand

A flap over a plan to reduce California’s prison population was resolved in the best traditions of the Capitol on Wednesday – by delaying a decision on it until next month.

The plan, part of efforts to close a cavernous $26.3 billion budget deficit, had threatened to derail a fragile compromise reached Monday among legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But legislative leaders said sidestepping the issue paves the way for votes in both the Senate and Assembly this afternoon or evening on a budget-balancing package of 28 bills.

“Everything’s on track,” said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, after he and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, met privately with Schwarzenegger in his office.

The budget-balancing package includes cutting $1.2 billion from the state’s prison spending. Under a proposal supported by the governor and Democratic legislative leaders, about two-thirds of the money would be saved by reducing the prisons’ overall population of 167,700 by about 27,000.

Elements of the reduction plan range from allowing 6,300 aged or infirm inmates to move home or to a care facility while being electronically monitored, to reviewing the cases of as many as 8,500 illegal immigrants for possible deportation.

But Assembly Republican leader Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo vociferously objected to the proposal on Tuesday, contending it had not been part of the deal he agreed to on Monday.

A Blakeslee e-mail to his caucus’ members titled “Budget Double Cross?” accused Democrats of “concocting a radioactive corrections bill.”

He told Bass and Steinberg that Assembly Republicans would not provide the votes needed to give the budget-balancing bills the necessary two-thirds approval if the prisoner reduction plan were part of the package.

News of the plan also infuriated crime victims’ rights groups.

“We realize that these are tough economic times and that cuts are being made everywhere, but public safety must be a top priority,” Patricia Wenskunas, founder and CEO of Crime Survivors Inc., said in a joint statement released by several groups.

“I don’t know what political games they’re playing, but it’s going to get someone killed.”

But the board of directors of the California Police Chiefs Association voted to endorse the plan, and after meeting with the governor Wednesday morning, Democratic leaders said the proposal would not be considered until August anyway.

In a hallway news conference, Schwarzenegger downplayed the flap as just a case of “some hiccups, and some obstacles and bumps in the road … there will be some difficult moments, but the bottom line is we are going to get this budget done.”

Blakeslee followed the governor with his own hallway news conference, saying he was gratified that the prison-depopulating plan, which he referred to as “an 11th-hour jam job,” would be postponed.

“There was an effort by some to try and make that happen (now),” he said, “which was not consistent with the agreement” made by leaders and the governor.

Asked if he thought Democrats had tried to pull a fast one, or whether it had been a misunderstanding, Blakeslee said, “I’m more than happy to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.”

Corrections officials have estimated that each month the state delays in enacting a prison population reduction represents $100 million in lost savings.

And notwithstanding all of Wednesday’s no-harm-done affability, reducing the prison population promises to be an issue fraught with disharmony next month.

Steinberg said there was no intent on the part of Democrats or the governor to change the depopulation plan next month.

But Blakeslee said Republican lawmakers were developing a counterproposal to reducing prison populations that “the public and law enforcement community will be very welcoming to work with.”

He declined to give details other than to say it “would not entail the release of dangerous prisoners onto our streets.”

Publication: Sacramento Bee