ShareThisThe dominant cultural trait of the California state Capitol is procrastination, a chronic tendency to deny reality as long as possible and thus avoid the political consequences of facing it.
That's why we have a perpetual state budget crisis, why we're on the brink of a calamitous water supply shortage, why public education is in turmoil, why our highways are congested and potholed, and, lastly, why we have a prison system with twice as many inmates as it was designed to handle.
These aren't sudden, unavoidable accidents. They are conditions that voters and officeholders allowed to fester despite multiple warnings, proof of a broken political system.
On Tuesday, a panel of three federal judges ordered the state to reduce its prison population, now over 160,000, by more than one-fourth in two years or, implicitly, face a complete judicial takeover. A federal court receiver already has taken control of the prison health system.
"The rights of California's prisoners have repeatedly been ignored," the judges wrote. "Where the political process has utterly failed to protect the constitutional rights of a minority, the courts can, and must, vindicate those rights."
The judges framed the political dilemma of the prisons perfectly, saying, "The convergence of tough-on-crime policies and an unwillingness to expend the necessary funds to support the population growth has brought California's prisons to the breaking point."
By coincidence, or not, the ruling came just days after the Legislature, true to form, stalled on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to reduce the inmate population by 27,000 through a variety of specific steps, including early release of low-intensity inmates.
Schwarzenegger and legislators agreed to slash prison spending by $1.2 billion but deadlocked on how to achieve the savings, with Republicans opposed to anything that smacked of leniency and some Democrats worried about being branded soft on crime.
The judges' order, which could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, should give Schwarzenegger some potent ammunition when the issue is rejoined later this month -- after, of course, politicians emit the usual noises about federal meddling.
Make no mistake: California brought this situation upon itself, as the judges declared, by continuing to pass tough sentencing laws, such as "three strikes, you're out," but refusing to spend what it would require to legally house, clothe, feed, medicate and educate what became a flood of new inmates.
When California launched its lock-'em-up policy 30 years ago -- the result of some Democratic legislators and judges losing their positions after being accused of softness on crime -- the state had about 20,000 inmates. Now it has more than 160,000.
There's an old saying in police and prosecutorial circles: Don't do the crime unless you want to do the time. A political corollary should be: Don't crack down on crime unless you're willing to spend the dime.
(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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