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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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Ed is a Political Scientist who claims to finds “the spatial and geographic context of political behavior — partisanship, turnout, and public opinion” — particularly thrilling. You can learn more, vaguely inappropriate, things about Ed here. In the meantime, we’re thrilled to feature his post questioning California’s questionable budget priorities. He blogs at Gin and Tacos.
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Comments 7
Em — March 12, 2010
really well said and presented. thanks for that.
KarenS — March 12, 2010
"a trainwreck like Michigan, where a mind-blowing 22% of the state budget is spent on warehousing the poor in prisons."
Oh. My. God. Thank you so much for providing that link.
I'm off to write my state representative.
thewhatifgirl — March 12, 2010
Hasn't California already moved toward an incomplete decriminilization of weed by reducing the penalties?
Dan — March 12, 2010
As usual, I have to warn you that English is not my first language.
"Spending twice as much on prisons as higher education should prompt some soul searching"
But not just for California's government. The state's residents have some soul searching to do too.
Maybe the government would not spend so much in the prison system if people, as whole, comitted less crimes.
De-criminalizing drugs would go a long way, but it will not solve 100% of the problem. I don't think that people are entitled to commit crimes just because they are poor. Yes, unlike most sociologist, I believe that they can do better than that. If people in the XII century could behave (and most of them were way poorer than today's California poorest), they can do it too.
Less crime equals less money for the prison system. Sometimes the government cannot solve the problems alone.
Jeremiah — March 14, 2010
Not sure how this blog lets an author get away with a sentence like this:
"The more important questions is[sic] how prison systems, and California’s in particular, can absorb the coming increase in crime concomitant with an extended period of double digit unemployment."
You understand his entire thesis is predicated on a fantasy, right? Did this blog's authors not catch that? Why is it when the poor are being imprisoned, "there's a better way", but suddenly the thought of their imminent release conjures an increase in crime!??
Because Ed too is conditioned to perceive prison as a permanent status, irrespective of actual physical circumstances. Once a criminal, always a criminal, and there's just no way to change that, right, Ed?
And isn't this thinking the root of all the mandatory minimum policies, etc? That people cannot really be rehabilitated? And because they cannot be rehabilitated, they cannot remain in society? Hence, "human warehousing?"
Sharon — March 18, 2010
Ed has used a chart from the California Legislative Analyst Office's report on a California state constitutional amendment Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed that would impose General Fund restrictions on Corrections and Higher Education spending - in essence forever linking the two. The full report is here:
http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/PubDetails.aspx?id=2186
and I would recommend reading it. The Legislative Analyst Office does a wonderful job of analyzing something that has become painfully oversimplified for most people.
My concern is the use of the chart here isolates it from it's source material and is misleading.
While it does represent General Fund spending on both corrections and universities in California, neither the university system nor the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation are solely funded by the state's General Fund (although corrections comes close). The report the chart came from states :
"The proposal’s spending requirements for UC and CSU relate only to General Fund support. This simplistic measure, however, in no way captures the state’s commitment to higher education spending."
In truth, as a Californian, I don't like the idea in this post that my state doesn't care about higher education. It does. A better idea of the proposed funding of the higher education for the coming year is here:
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/StateAgencyBudgets/6013/agency.html
and it includes all funding sources, not just the General Fund.
I also reject the idea that higher education and corrections have to be pitted against one another in a zero sum relationship. Governments, especially in difficult economic times, have to prioritize between higher ed, K-12, health and human services, public safety, transportation, consumer protection, etc. in the face of dwindling revenue. It may be a zero sum relationship, but why not include all the players?
That being said, there are definitely things that could be done to reduce the cost of corrections. But our government must reflect our wishes in making the policies and laws that reduce those costs. And the citizens of California, as much as they might like to use the limited General Fund for other areas besides corrections, are not ready to give up on things like the war on drugs or three strikes that have lead to the warehousing of inmates in California. Most Californians think you can lock an inmate in a box and keep that person there for pennies a day. And the only way to keep us all safe is if said inmate is in that box for the rest of their natural life. This is what our government has to represent in the choices it makes.
It's easier to look at reducing General Fund support to universities, because they can adjust student fees to cover the lost revenue. As someone who struggled for years repaying student loans, I don't favor that either. California's system of Universities, State Colleges and Community colleges was conceived as one where a higher education was supposed to be available to all Californians based upon academic ability, not ability to pay. But convincing an emotional and increasingly misinformed public to give up on their fear of "murderers running loose in the streets" to reduce spending in other areas of government and thus free up funds for higher ed is about as easy as having a rational discussion about finding additional revenue by revising our property tax system.