Fewer inmates, but growing prison budget
The Newsom administration’s budget for the California Department of Corrections echoes a situation found throughout our government. Per-inmate spending has hit $102,000 this year and should top $112,000 by next year even though inmate populations have dropped precipitously, according to recent reports. The state spends more money to do less.
In the last decade, state officials passed a far-reaching realignment plan that sent more inmates to county jails to deal with court orders to reduce overcrowding. Voters also approved three statewide initiatives that loosened California’s strict “three strikes” law, reduced penalties for some property and drug crimes and expanded the use of parole.
As the Legislative Analyst’s Office explained last year, after those reforms “the state’s inmate population declined by nearly one-quarter and the parolee population declined by nearly one-half.” That’s a significant drop, yet the department’s “spending increased by over $3 billion, or more than a third” since those policies were implemented. The new state budget bumps spending $1.2 billion.
The courts imposed some of the new costs. Others were the result of the pandemic, but the main drivers are large raises negotiated by the prison guards’ union and ballooning pension costs.
In recent years, the California Legislature has overwhelmingly approved more lucrative contracts with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association despite notes from the LAO that there was “no evident justification” for raises of the scale approved by the Legislature.
It’s not hard to figure out why. Though the CCPOA has lost much its political clout relative in the past decade, it’s still a big-spending public sector union. In 2018, though it contributed some amount to the California Republican Party, it donated much more to the California Democratic Party and in support of Gavin Newsom’s election.
As Phil Matier at the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2019, “The union was the only law enforcement group to endorse Newsom for governor and backed up the endorsement by spending $1 million on an independent committee to support his campaign.”
Just last year, it spent over $1 million to oust Republican state Sen. John Moorlach, since he was one of the only Republicans in the Legislature willing to actually challenge the power of public sector unions like the CCPOA.
Though some Democratic lawmakers like Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, have said they won’t accept donations from law enforcement unions anymore, they tend to be happy recipients of such money, including from CCPOA.
Hence the ever-bloating corrections budget despite significant reforms and lots of progressive rhetoric from the same lawmakers who have approved CCPOA contracts.
Even cost-saving efforts — e.g., the governor’s plan to shutter two prisons — won’t reduce corrections costs fast enough. The state modestly cut its prison work force but “inmates are so far leaving the prisons at a faster rate than correctional officers,” the Sacramento Bee reported. That is highlighted by plummeting staff-to-inmate ratios.
The prison-spending situation isn’t different than what we find in other agencies such as the California Department of Transportation. California has among the worst roads in the nation, yet some of the highest per-mile costs, according to a Reason Foundation report.
Until California tries to base its spending on needs rather than public-employee demands, all of its public services will remain on this “spend more for less” trajectory.