Boy, you can't open the paper these days without seeing something about how irrevocably fucked California's finances are. With a budget deficit approaching a staggering $40 billion dollars, it's worth noting that not only is their deficit the biggest in the country in absolute terms but also as a proportion of state GDP. That's pretty impressive given that California's economy is bigger than all but a handful of countries.
In my line of work, "Raiding the UCs" is a very real phenomenon. Faculty have seen salaries slashed by 20% (with talk of more cuts to come) while students have experienced dramatic tuition hikes – although it's fair to note that in-state tuition before the hikes was far lower than in most states. The recent cuts come on the tail end of a 15 year trend that has seen the university system's share of the state budget halved. With too many obligations and not enough money, it would make sense that cuts to a vital sector like education would be indicative of cuts across the board.
Oh.
Lost in the budget debate is the fact that California spends nearly 10% of its annual budget on the Department of Corrections. Eight billion dollars. Let's see that with the zeroes: $8,000,000,000. This is, of course, in addition to other money spent on law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Such figures look reasonable only in comparison to a trainwreck like Michigan, where a mind-blowing 22% of the state budget is spent on warehousing the poor in prisons.
We can re-hash all the usual, obvious, and valid culprits – "guideline" sentencing, mandatory minimums, three strikes, a vast social underclass deriving minimal benefit from the state's aggregate wealth – but we'd say nothing new.
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The more important questions is how prison systems, and California's in particular, can absorb the coming increase in crime concomitant with an extended period of double digit unemployment. At a time when every agency needs to get cheaper, the CDC must continue to get bigger (and inevitably costlier) to provide a convenient dumping ground for society's expendables.
This problem is fascinating because like the Federal budget there is no reasonable move that doesn't make the situation worse. California can start paroling more people.
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With no jobs available even for Californians with clean criminal backgrounds, we can imagine how few ex-inmates will find an "honest" living and how high the rate of recidivism will be. It can adopt different sentencing guidelines, which is politically unlikely and will provide only gradual long-term relief.
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They can simply stop arresting and/or charging so many people, but that too is politically infeasible and may ultimately lead to increased crime levels. They can, as publications as mainstream as Time have noted, formally surrender in the War on Drugs and legalize weed. I will believe that when I see it (although I don't entirely discount it as the budget situation gets progressively more desperate). They could simply slash the budget, which may not be realistic given the high fixed costs of the system and the current levels of overcrowding/understaffing.
Spending twice as much on prisons as higher education should prompt some soul searching.
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I won't hold my breath; in all likelihood the status quo will be maintained and the share of the budget devoted to corrections will continue to increase. Devoting one of every ten tax dollars to locking up the poor is understood as the cost of doing business in a state and society that choose to solve the problem of a persistent underclass the same way it deals with trash; that is, by collecting it in cities and shipping it out to the middle of nowhere to be buried under a mountain of other garbage, never to be seen or thought of again.
RosaLux says:
Yea, it's not that Californians love blowing their budget on incarceration. The key power behind that 8 billion dollar price tag is the powerful state prison-guard association and their impressive lobbying power. More prisons, draconian sentencing laws to fill the prisons, and excessively high salaries for the guards. There's your 8 billion – and there's also example number 5 million of how weak campaign finance laws poison just about all policy decisions in this country. See recent Economist article below.
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15580530&fsrc=rss
Ike says:
At some point, reasonably sensible people take a look at their situation (vis-a-vis shelter and food and such like) and consider what it would be like if one were incarcerated. Then one starts to wonder what sorts of crimes one would have to commit in order to receive baseline medical care, internet access, and room & board. Prison sucks. Other situations also suck.
vghoul says:
Well, you can't put a price on maintaining [under armed guard] a massive reserve of indentured servants for undesirable labor. Hell, once enough people get desperate enough, we won't have to keep outsourcing all these jobs to damned foreign barbarians to maintain an appropriately-opulent standard of living for The Very Few People Who Actually Matter!
Natalie says:
Man, I picked SUCH an awesome time to move to California.
Hazy Davy says:
Here in California, you get what you pay for.
ladiesbane says:
@Hazy Davy: here in California, I'm getting a lot of things I don't want, and have to pay for anyway. I love Democracy, but reactive law making and King Stork administration and "we can vote for unicorns because we WANT them" is driving me nuts, and I still don't have my unicorn.
captialist Pig says:
If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population! Our capital punishment laws aren't used enough. We should bring back the death penalty for debtors' prisons.
moonbat says:
I've read polls (Gallup?) that say numbers are increasing and may even be at a slim majority for the legalization of pot – not just for medical purposes, but legalization period. I don't recall the context – whether this was nationwide, or just in CA. As the situation becomes more dire in CA, I expect a groundswell of support – beyond the usual fringe politicians – to repeal this expensive prohibition, because the current setup is not sustainable.
I moved to CA in 1994, loved it, but am looking to get out, not only from CA, but from the USA as well. Both governments are incredibly dysfunctional, CA's is hamstrung by stupid laws (Prop 13 but also the 2/3 majority requirement to raise taxes) put on the books by an out of control ballot process, initially instituted by late 19th century progressives. (There's irony for ya). There is some agitation among the powers that be for a state constitutional convention to basically hit RESET on all of this and start over – I think this will happen – but it will take years to work it all out. And anyway, polls show that a majority like regressive measures, such as the 2/3 majority requirement to raise taxes, and so regressive items such as this will likely survive a rewrite of the state's constitution.
The US is in the thrall of the military-financial-medical-media complex, which essentially means monied interests own the country lock-stock-n-barrel, and benefit greatly by resisting any and all changes. They benefit from a dumbed down and frightened population that they set fighting against each other for diminishing scraps of what was once the American Dream. I see no evidence that any of this is going to change soon, without a violent crash that will cause much suffering. I did what I could to resist it/change it, but now I'm heading for the exits.
Lisa says:
Hi Ed,
Gwen and I would love to re-post this at Sociological Images (www.contexts.org/socimages). If you're amenable, please email us at socimages@contexts.org.
Lisa
Crazy for Urban Planning says:
I'm sorry for cut and pasting a previous paragraph – but this summarizes the problems America is facing better than anything I have read in a while: Thanks Moonbat! If I were smarter I'd move to Australia or somewhere cooler than America…
The US is in the thrall of the military-financial-medical-media complex, which essentially means monied interests own the country lock-stock-n-barrel, and benefit greatly by resisting any and all changes. They benefit from a dumbed down and frightened population that they set fighting against each other for diminishing scraps of what was once the American Dream. I see no evidence that any of this is going to change soon, without a violent crash that will cause much suffering. I did what I could to resist it/change it, but now I'm heading for the exits.
Hazy Davy says:
@LadiesBane: You can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes,…
(I was attempting to imply that if you have prison capacity, you'll be less reluctant to imprison folks, as an example.)
I don't know what King Stork means.
And I've got your unicorn, right here.