Wednesday, Senate Democrats presented a plan to reduce prison crowding that takes a much different approach than the proposal championed a day earlier by Gov. Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker John A. Perez, D-Los Angeles.
The Senate proposal calls for settling years-long litigation on prison crowding by creating a new prison oversight commission and offering up to $300 million in grants to local governments to reduce inmate recidivism. The state would get three more years to reduce the population of its 33 prisons.
Brown and Perez, along with Republican legislative leaders and criminal-justice groups, support legislation to reduce the prison population by spending about $700 million over two years to put thousands of inmates in out-of-state prisons, county jails, and a private prison in the Mojave Desert.
The governor’s plan would scrap the planned 2016 closure of California Rehabilitation Center in Norco. The Senate proposal would leave the closure timeline unchanged.
Wednesday, both camps contended that their approach was the best way to avoid the release of 9,600 inmates later this year.
At a Capitol news conference, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, criticized the governor’s approach as “the same tired proposals” that would not reduce the state's high inmate recidivism rate.
State Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, stood beside Steinberg and later said of Brown’s plan, “I don’t know what we’d accomplish other than renting prison beds at great cost.”
Plaintiffs lawyer Donald Specter of the Prison Law Office said the Senate Democrats’ proposal “was acceptable to us” and he looked forward to settlement talks with the governor and legislative leaders.
Brown, though, criticized the Senate plan.
“It would not be responsible to turn over California’s criminal justice policy to inmate lawyers who are not accountable to the people,” the Democratic governor said in a statement.
“My plan avoids early releases of thousands of prisoners and lays the foundation for longer-term changes, and that’s why local officials and law enforcement support it,” the Democratic governor said.
In a press release, Perez said he was “deeply skeptical about Senator Steinberg’s approach that gives prisoner plaintiffs who favor mass release of prisoners the power to set our prison population and effectively takes the people’s elected representatives out of the equation.”
A panel of three federal judges has given the state until Dec. 31 to reduce its prison population. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month refused the Brown administration’s motion to block the order and the governor has appealed.
Some Inland Southern California criminal-justice officials voiced cautious support for Senate Democrats’ approach.
Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach called Wednesday’s proposal “well-intentioned.” He warned, though, of potential pitfalls to plans to expand upon a 2009 law that rewarded local agencies that reduced recidivism.
The offenders affected by the 2009 law were felony parolees, he said, not actual prison inmates. “Everyone should understand and appreciate that you’re dealing with a different class of criminal,” he said. “It’s a more hard-core population.”
Zellerbach, though, said he thinks there are good parts in both of this week’s plans. Whatever the approach, he said, lawmakers have to avoid the threatened inmate release.
“That would be a public-safety crisis,” he said.