I applaud the Governor's intentions, it is far more sensible to allocate resources to higher education than to prisons.
Having mentioned that, I think it should be stated that he is solving the wrong problem here. The reason tuition is increasing so rapidly in California is because the State no longer has the wherewithal to properly fund its educational institutions. This is a direct consequence of the fact that Californians are able to vote on ballot initiatives obligating that state's government to take on, sometimes quite expensive, commitments. Pair this with the fact that Californians have made increasing their tax burden exceedingly difficult, and you can see the Governor's problem.
That situation is really a mess. Even for prisons, he can't cut spending below a certain amount, or the law enforcement brotherhoods and lobbyists will come after him. He can't decrease the number of people in prison because of the Three Strikes ballot initiative, which obliges him to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely. And the worse part about it is that he needs to do both, decrease spending and the number of incarcerated people.
And that is one of what must be a large number of issues he needs to work through to get the budget on track. Its prisons vs. education, that decision should be the easiest.
I don't envy that State's leaders. People anywhere make democratic leadership challenging but the people of California must be especially difficult to manage.
Not so minor point: the California Three Strikes law requires the first two felonies to be "violent" or "serious". From the reference I just checked, the only non-violent serious crimes are "lewd or lascivious act on a child under the age of 14 years" and providing hard drugs to minors ("heroin, cocaine, phencyclidine(PCP), or any methamphetamine-related drug" or a precursor of the latter).
I find it impossible to work up any sympathy for someone who commits two such crimes and then shows he has no intention of staying on the right side of the law by committing any felony, violent or not. I also don't see how it's bad public policy; as one person put it WRT Giuliani's clean up of New York City: "He found the root cause of crime, criminals."
> This is a direct consequence of the fact that Californians are able to vote on ballot initiatives obligating that state's government to take on, sometimes quite expensive, commitments.
The voter mandated spending is less than the revenue, so the gap is due to spending that the legislature and governor insisted on.
> Pair this with the fact that Californians have made increasing their tax burden exceedingly difficult
Not true, and not relevant due to the above.
> the law enforcement brotherhoods and lobbyists will come after him.
It's interesting that you didn't mention the education lobbyists, who get 50% by statute.
> the people of California must be especially difficult to manage.
Let me suggest that politicians are not supposed to "manage" the people that they supposedly represent and should fail when they try.
BTW - CA has three strikes because politicians couldn't be trusted to keep violent thugs in jail. That was a change - until the 70s, they did.
Sounds like what we really need to do is outsource the prisons. To, say, Mexico, or China. I'll bet the Chinese don't pay $50,000 per prisoner per year to keep their prisoners locked up -- heck, they probably harness their labour to turn a profit.
One of my favourite theories on prison reform: a huge problem with prisons is the formation of gangs and other social structures within the prison walls; not only do these promote the emergence of a criminal culture within the prison, they also make the prisoners harder to guard.
This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.
Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
This would not be the case. Enforcing such a policy would be prohibitively expensive. Following the theme of the article, we can't even afford < 12 student classes, and schools are much cheaper than prisons.
In my opinion the solution is simple: put less people in prison. This chart says it all for me:
Just that many prisoners already know each other from their own neighborhoods. The groundwork of the social structure is already in place.
The problem is not guarding prisoners, the problem with prison reform is that it doesn't reform anything. The question is what do we want prisoners to do once they're out? There is always a political push for longer sentences but it's economically infeasible. So if we're then asking what we can do to make these people productive members of society again, then that takes money.
But it seems to me that htis is just another example of the kind of government that brought California to bankruptcy. Governing by emotional appeals to the way our values tell us the world should behave is not a recipe for success in a world that behaves as the chips fall.
More to the point, read Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit for a discussion of the hubris of believing that we can engineer a world to our liking, and that this world be at all sustainable.
Exactly. Why should the government be spending more on the school system than on prisons? There isn't even a real argument, it's just being taken as a given. If anything improving the prison system should be given higher priority than fixing the college system, because prisoners have to be there. They don't have a choice. Whereas students can just opt out of college, or else go to a private college.
[+] [-] bilbo0s|16 years ago|reply
Having mentioned that, I think it should be stated that he is solving the wrong problem here. The reason tuition is increasing so rapidly in California is because the State no longer has the wherewithal to properly fund its educational institutions. This is a direct consequence of the fact that Californians are able to vote on ballot initiatives obligating that state's government to take on, sometimes quite expensive, commitments. Pair this with the fact that Californians have made increasing their tax burden exceedingly difficult, and you can see the Governor's problem.
That situation is really a mess. Even for prisons, he can't cut spending below a certain amount, or the law enforcement brotherhoods and lobbyists will come after him. He can't decrease the number of people in prison because of the Three Strikes ballot initiative, which obliges him to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely. And the worse part about it is that he needs to do both, decrease spending and the number of incarcerated people.
And that is one of what must be a large number of issues he needs to work through to get the budget on track. Its prisons vs. education, that decision should be the easiest.
I don't envy that State's leaders. People anywhere make democratic leadership challenging but the people of California must be especially difficult to manage.
[+] [-] hga|16 years ago|reply
I find it impossible to work up any sympathy for someone who commits two such crimes and then shows he has no intention of staying on the right side of the law by committing any felony, violent or not. I also don't see how it's bad public policy; as one person put it WRT Giuliani's clean up of New York City: "He found the root cause of crime, criminals."
[+] [-] anamax|16 years ago|reply
The voter mandated spending is less than the revenue, so the gap is due to spending that the legislature and governor insisted on.
> Pair this with the fact that Californians have made increasing their tax burden exceedingly difficult
Not true, and not relevant due to the above.
> the law enforcement brotherhoods and lobbyists will come after him.
It's interesting that you didn't mention the education lobbyists, who get 50% by statute.
> the people of California must be especially difficult to manage.
Let me suggest that politicians are not supposed to "manage" the people that they supposedly represent and should fail when they try.
BTW - CA has three strikes because politicians couldn't be trusted to keep violent thugs in jail. That was a change - until the 70s, they did.
[+] [-] hugh_|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh_|16 years ago|reply
This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.
Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
[+] [-] qeorge|16 years ago|reply
This would not be the case. Enforcing such a policy would be prohibitively expensive. Following the theme of the article, we can't even afford < 12 student classes, and schools are much cheaper than prisons.
In my opinion the solution is simple: put less people in prison. This chart says it all for me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-...
[+] [-] marcusbooster|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|16 years ago|reply
But it seems to me that htis is just another example of the kind of government that brought California to bankruptcy. Governing by emotional appeals to the way our values tell us the world should behave is not a recipe for success in a world that behaves as the chips fall.
More to the point, read Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit for a discussion of the hubris of believing that we can engineer a world to our liking, and that this world be at all sustainable.
[+] [-] Alex3917|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teeja|16 years ago|reply
On the surface, that number looks somewhat insane.
[+] [-] dschobel|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danteembermage|16 years ago|reply