By Steven T. Jones
For all the outrage and political posturing around federal judges ordering California to reduce the state’s prison population, this has been foreseeable for more than a decade and it’s something that our elected leaders should embrace as both humane and a partial solution to our budget woes.
The bottom line is our prisons are shamefully overcrowded, thanks largely to legislators pushing tough-on-crime and no-new-taxes measures for decades. But politicians from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Attorney General Jerry Brown have vowed to fight the order all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It seems like everyone’s on the same page with this as far as elected officials,” Ronn Owens said on KGO radio this morning, where Lt. Gov. (and gubernatorial candidate) John Garamendi sounded a little more reasonable than other politicians who have been tripping all over themselves to sound tough and indignant, lest someone call them soft on crime.
“We’ve known this is coming. This is not something new,” Garamendi said. “The problem is failed leadership.” He called for more creative incarceration solutions such as more conservation camps (not the best idea) and more aggressive efforts to lower recidivism rates (a better idea). But he shied away from more radical and effective solutions such as ending the war on drugs.
Brown, after taking a courageous stand in favor of judicial independence in December, should be ashamed of himself. Instead of beating his chest, he should be talking about the kinds of obvious solutions that he’s advocated in his previous iterations, such as ending the war on drugs, parole reform, and freeing most nonviolent offenders.
We can no longer afford to have some of the world’s highest incarceration rates and lowest tax rates, it’s just that simple.