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.
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.
Heck, they're probably not a democracy. And probably have no constitution or bill of rights. And probably haven't caught up with the 19th century. And probably disappear people left and right.
I have wondered for years why it costs money to have inmates. Slaves in the old south would cost about as much as a good new car (40k according to free the slaves) so you would think there would be some value in inmates.
I compare them to slaves because they have about the same motivation for doing work.
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."
No one is arguing that it is bad public policy. I myself am only arguing that it is prudent to reconcile public policy solutions to the public's bank account prior to implementing them.
I live in Houston, yes I'm a Texan. No one is tougher on crime than Texas. In some cases, yes, Texas is too tough. One of the major reasons Texas did not follow along on the whole Three Strikes bandwagon was because the political leadership thought it might not be cost effective. Now I don't know if it is or it isn't, I would need more data to make that determination.
My point is, the leadership here in Texas, at least had the ability to analyze the likely fiscal consequences of such a policy and then decide whether or not to enact it. Balancing the fiscal consequences with the public safety benefits. In California, unless I am misunderstanding their ballot initiatives, the leadership has no choice but to enact the policy. Regardless of the policy's fiscal consequences.
I'm just not so sure that is a good way to do things.
"[...] the Three Strikes ballot initiative ... obliges [the Governor] to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely."
This is a statement of fact, with no assertion made as to 'goodness' or 'badness' of that fact. Indeed I would argue that there is no uncontestable 'objective' basis on which to base such a appraisal. Given the facts present in the article.
What I have been saying is that there is an uncontestable 'objective' basis for judging the fiscal consequences of these policies. Further, that I am unsure as to whether or not precluding your leaders from considering those fiscal consequences is bad policy. I am thinking that it is bad policy. Please note that this is not about Three Strikes, it is about the wisdom of not letting your leaders judge the merits of Three Strikes before it is implemented. And, more generally, not letting your leaders judge the merits of ballot initiatives before they are implemented.
> 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.
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.
Are the folks in prison really the same folks who would otherwise be attending the University of California? I think they're generally pretty different demographics.
Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.
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.
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.
Yes, that's the problem. They need to get an incentive to prepare for life outside prison. Many of the prisoners don't have the education or the skills to get a real alternative. If they have a choice of a minimum wage or selling drugs, they will often choose the easy way.
I think the best solution would be to increase prison sentences, but give a similar (if not greater) reduction if they choose to re-educate/train themselves. They would also have to show a real intent, so that they don't just sit there without making an effort.
This will not work for everyone, but I am sure that it will reduce the number of prisoners with 3 strikes.
The second problem is the actual workplaces. The state should pay a large amount of the ex-prisoner's salary for the first year, and a smaller amount in the second year. This will encourage companies to hire them. I'm not an economist, but I assume that this cost will be payed back by keeping them out of prisons.
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:
Let's assume that the fraction of people in prison has grown over the last 70 years. This is either because sentencing has got harsher or because people are committing more crimes. Anecdotally, though, sentencing seems to have got less harsh -- for instance in the 1950s the Boggs act resulted in minimum mandatory sentences of 5-20 years for a first drug offense. Thus, we must conclude that people are committing more crimes than before.
Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.
27 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadHaving 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.
Sad.
Great role model.
I compare them to slaves because they have about the same motivation for doing work.
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."
I live in Houston, yes I'm a Texan. No one is tougher on crime than Texas. In some cases, yes, Texas is too tough. One of the major reasons Texas did not follow along on the whole Three Strikes bandwagon was because the political leadership thought it might not be cost effective. Now I don't know if it is or it isn't, I would need more data to make that determination.
My point is, the leadership here in Texas, at least had the ability to analyze the likely fiscal consequences of such a policy and then decide whether or not to enact it. Balancing the fiscal consequences with the public safety benefits. In California, unless I am misunderstanding their ballot initiatives, the leadership has no choice but to enact the policy. Regardless of the policy's fiscal consequences.
I'm just not so sure that is a good way to do things.
"No one is arguing that it is bad public policy."
I don't see how the above two statements can be reconciled.
This is a statement of fact, with no assertion made as to 'goodness' or 'badness' of that fact. Indeed I would argue that there is no uncontestable 'objective' basis on which to base such a appraisal. Given the facts present in the article.
What I have been saying is that there is an uncontestable 'objective' basis for judging the fiscal consequences of these policies. Further, that I am unsure as to whether or not precluding your leaders from considering those fiscal consequences is bad policy. I am thinking that it is bad policy. Please note that this is not about Three Strikes, it is about the wisdom of not letting your leaders judge the merits of Three Strikes before it is implemented. And, more generally, not letting your leaders judge the merits of ballot initiatives before they are implemented.
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.
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.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/27529879
Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.
On the surface, that number looks somewhat insane.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079219/
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 think the best solution would be to increase prison sentences, but give a similar (if not greater) reduction if they choose to re-educate/train themselves. They would also have to show a real intent, so that they don't just sit there without making an effort.
This will not work for everyone, but I am sure that it will reduce the number of prisoners with 3 strikes.
The second problem is the actual workplaces. The state should pay a large amount of the ex-prisoner's salary for the first year, and a smaller amount in the second year. This will encourage companies to hire them. I'm not an economist, but I assume that this cost will be payed back by keeping them out of prisons.
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-...
Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.
Or because more crimes are being prosecuted. It's completely false to say that it must be for one or other or those two reasons.