California's Dubious Course on Prison Crowding

In 1976, under the golden dome of the State Capitol in Sacramento, a governor responsive to what he later called the anti-crime "mood" of the day signed legislation significantly increasing the length of prison terms in California.

The new law scrapped indeterminate sentencing, which gave judges and parole boards wide flexibility, and replaced it with a system that imposed fixed prison terms for most crimes. California’s “determinant sentencing” statute was the beginning of a trend. Over the years, ballot initiatives and legislative actions mandated ever lengthier sentences for repeat offenders. By 2011, California housed more than 143,000 inmates in 33 prisons built for 83,000, and the Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce its prison population. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said California prison overcrowding had exacerbated mental illness and caused “needless suffering and death.”

California’s governor, after fiercely resisting the Supreme Court order with legal and political maneuvers, eventually reduced the prison population by more than 40,000. Mostly, this was accomplished by a process called “re-alignment,” in which those convicted of specified crimes were sent to county jails instead of state prisons. Now, the governor is balking at another federal court requiring him to release another 9,600 prisoners by year’s end.

The governor is Jerry Brown, the man who signed the determinate sentence bill in 1976. He was then the nation’s youngest governor, an eccentric and unfocused politician who earned the sobriquet of “Governor Moonbeam” from columnist Mike Royko. Judging by the debate at the time, neither Brown nor the legislators who approved the bill contemplated the possibility of prison overcrowding.

Brown subsequently mastered the gritty nuts-and-bolts of governance as a no-nonsense mayor of troubled Oakland, and California voters in 2010 gave him another chance as governor. Now 75 years old, Brown has on balance been an effective governor -- some would say an exceptional one -- the second time around. Brown notably persuaded voters to raise taxes while also making cutbacks that restored the state to fiscal solvency. Polls give him strong approval ratings; he is favored to win re-election if he runs again next year.

Even so, Brown has displayed what California journalist Richard Ehisen, who has written on prison issues, calls a “puzzling” reluctance to endorse sentencing reform at a time when states not known for their liberalism are doing just that. In 2003, Texas passed a law that substituted probation for a prison term for persons convicted of possessing less than a gram of drugs. In 2007, under conservative Republican Gov. Rick Perry, Texas allocated $241 million for drug treatment and other prison alternatives. Both inmate populations and violent crime are down in the state. Republicans also control statehouses in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, among others, which have embraced drug rehabilitation and sentencing reform with positive results.

Via: Real Clear Politics

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