CALIFORNIA TO RELEASE PRISONERS TO REDUCE BUDGET DEFICIT

The California Assembly on the last day of its 2009 session passed a statute cutting prison expenditures by 300,000,000 dollars and calling for the early release of 17,000 inmates. The state budget called for a reduction in the prison budget of 1.2 billion dollars. Approximately $700,000,000 can be saved by administrative actions controlled by Governor Schwarzenegger. This leaves the budget $230,000,000 dollars in the red.

Last August Governor Schwarzenegger and Democratic leaders came up with a plan to reduce the prison budget by 1.2 billion dollars. Specifically the plan would have required that:

— Inmates with less than 12 months to serve, who are over age 60 or who are medically incapacitated could be released from prison and given home detention with electronic monitoring.

— Sentences for certain property crimes will be lowered to misdemeanors, meaning convicts won’t have to spend time in prison. Those include vehicle theft, petty theft with a prior conviction, receiving stolen property and check-kiting, a scam that primarily targets banks with fraudulent deposits.

— Allow more inmates to gain early release by completing educational, vocational or substance abuse rehabilitation programs.

— Ease supervision for thousands of parolees, making it more difficult to send them back to prison for violations.

This plan was approved by the State Senate last month. But the Senate caved in and accepted the State Assemblys plan which will leave a $230,000,000 hole in the budget and will release less prisoners. The Assembly plan would allow the reduction of parole supervision of some low level offenders thus preventing them from being sent back to prison and it would allow some offender to earn reductions in their prison sentence by completing rehabilitation programs. But it would not provide an early release program for elderly or medically incapacitated inmate and it would not redesignate some crimes currently chargeable as either felonies or misdemeanors as misdemeanors.

But more importantly it does not solve the problem of the two ton elephant in the middle of the room. A panel of Federal judges has found that state prisons are unable to provide medical and psychiatric care to all of the inmates in the vastly overcrowded prison facilitities. They ordered the state to reduce the prison population by 40,000 within the next two years and to provide a plan on how this will be done before the end of the month. The state is appealing the order to the U. S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court denied a request by the state to delay the formation of a plan to reduce the prison population.