To Our Elected Leaders,
I am writing in response to Governor Brown's recent statement announcing a new plan to raid budget reserves meant to restore anti-poverty programs for more prison expansion. He wants to spend several billion dollars in the next 5 years on leasing prison and jail beds across the state and country, and expanding three California prisons. We hope that you will take into consideration the overwhelming support by California voters for you to release people from our overcrowded prisons. We hope that instead of dipping into the state budget reserve to finance additional prison beds that you will look at more cost effective methods of reducing our prison population. Our budget reserve should be used for restorations to much needed social safety net programs, not more prison cells. We can not afford hundred of millions of dollars going into the already bloated corrections budget.
We believe the only sustainable solution to reducing overcrowding is to reduce the number of people who are imprisoned in California. We want the implementation of compassionate release, medical parole, geriatric parole, lifer parole, youth sentence reduction, expansion of good-time credits, reclassification of low-level felonies, and expansion of the Alternative Custody Program; all of which are among many cost-efficient, responsible options for population reduction. We hope that the administration’s plan does not include the use of additional transfers to out-of-state or in-state contract facilities such as the community correctional facilities Taft and Shafter that CDCR recently toured in Kern County.
Additionally, we hope that all current prison expansion projects are canceled including the $810 million in in-fill bed construction, which CDCR is looking to site at Donovan, Mule Creek, Folsom or Vacaville prisons. We hope that the reduction plan does not include “realigning” additional people to serve time in already overcrowded county jails or leasing jail bed space from any California County, specifically Alameda or Los Angeles. According to a recent Los Angeles Times Article "California prisons could free 1,000 to ease crowding" many county jails are unacceptably full. In Los Angeles County, for example, "the sheriff has simply said we can't handle any more," said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for Sheriff Lee Baca.
We do applaud you for reducing the amount of prisoners in prison since the implementation of realignment. However, in order to stay out of the fiscal crisis California has suffered through for so long, we need to invest in viable prison population reduction strategies. The cost per inmate - adjusted for inflation - has continued to climb and is substantially higher than in the mid-1990s. In California spending has increased to about $60,000 for each prisoner in 2013-14 which is 82.3 percent higher than in 1994-95 ($33,000 after inflation). At the same time, California's spending per K-12 student has risen by just 17.9 percent during the same period ($6,971 in 1994-95 to a projected $8,219 in 2013-14 after inflation). Spending per prisoner in California has increased nearly five times faster than spending per K-12 student over the past two decades. We need to focus on the priorities that are going to make California the great state it once was.
There is overwhelming support for your administration to release people from our overcrowded prisons immediately. We need a plan that shrinks the prison system through common sense sentencing reforms, and the expansion of elder parole, medical parole and good time credits. I ask you to pledge to invest in California's future, and not put one more dollar into the bloated corrections budget.
Sincerely,
= new reply since forum marked as read
