Complaints have been coming sporadically from around California ever since state prisons began dumping inmates back to counties last fall in a move designed to save money.
Yes, the state has given cities and (mostly) counties hundreds of millions of dollars as compensation for housing the former state convicts and supervising their parole.
But new spending under the prison realignment plan isn’t supposed to balance out with what was spent before. One main purpose is to save money for cash-strapped state government. Every nickel not spent housing inmates at more than $47,000 per year can go to public schools, in-home services for the frail elderly, parks and more.
But complaints rise anytime the money doesn’t balance out in a state mandate.
There have been plenty. One was voiced the other day on the blog of the Los Angeles police union, the Police Protective League, which griped there will be no jail time for a drunk woman driver whose car struck and killed a fireman as he rode a motorcycle near Merced.
Under a sentence pronounced early this year, the driver was to begin a year’s term in a county jail in late April. Instead, she was placed in house arrest because she was classified as a low-level prison inmate who committed a “non-serious, non-violent crime” and the county had no jail space for her. Tell that part about drunk driving being non-violent to the family of her victim, suggests the police union.
Where Is the Proof?
There is no evidence that getting jail time rather than house arrest with an ankle bracelet would lead this driver to behave better when she eventually returns to the road.
The mayor of La Puente also complained. “I think more crimes are being committed,” he told a radio interviewer in January. “It’s the ‘get a year’s sentence, I’ll be out in a week’ thing. They figure ‘I’ll take my chances. It’s worth it.'”
Yet the 23 crimes committed in that city during a random five-day period in May ranged from weapons possession to drunk driving, but there was only one arrest for violence, an assault and battery. That rate of one violent crime every five days, reported by the Local Crime News blog, is actually below the city’s rate for 2010, long before realignment was conceived. In that year, La Puente had 168 violent crimes, including two murders and four rapes, down by about half from its 2009 figures. So there is no readily visible evidence to support the mayor’s claims about realignment leading to more crime.
Same for Glendale, where police report they’ve taken $650,000 away from other projects to deal with parolees and persons on probation since the realignment program began.
“It’s essentially a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” Police Chief Ron De Pompa complained to his City Council.
We Have Heard It Before
That phenomenon was happening before realignment anyway in many counties from Fresno to Los Angeles to Placer, where jail capacity isn’t large enough to house all convicted inmates and suspects awaiting trial. Realignment may actually alleviate some of that problem, as several counties report spending their new state money to expand jails rather than just to supervise returned prisoners.
No one yet knows the long-term impact of sending non-violent convicts the state determines are low-risk back to their counties of origin.
There is no doubt about the financial benefits of the program. State prisons have so far moved out about 15 percent of their population, 22,500 inmates. That has created $1 billion in savings, with the total expected to reach $30 billion saved over 10 years as unneeded prisons are mothballed, 6,400 prison-guard and other positions are eliminated and contracts with out-of-state prisons that now house 9,500 California convicts are phased out by 2016.
In some places, there will be an economic price to pay for this, especially in Central Valley towns where prisons were welcomed during the 1980s and ‘90s.
At the same time, the state aims to end overcrowding that has seen gyms and other large areas in prisons filled with bunks to house a prison population that often vastly exceeded the facilities’ planned capacity.
It’s possible this will lead to a crime wave, as some warn, but there is no evidence yet to support that claim.
Which means this program may just be as necessary as Gov. Brown claimed when he announced it last year. Just as there always has been plenty of recidivism among released convicts in the past, there will be repeat crimes from the allegedly non-threatening sorts leaving prison today.
With cash flow to the state running billions of dollars behind forecasts through the first six months of this year, California needs to save what it can, even if that creates new problems. Few bargains have absolutely no downsides. This one seems to have fewer than expected.
Mr. Elias may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
