Prisons and Torching Money

Playing catch up from the three day weekend, here are three pieces about the ongoing prison mess—and the money it is costing us:

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THE SAC BEE DOES THE MATH: THE PRISON BUDGET INACTION COSTS TAXPAYERS $3.3 MILLION A DAY.

It’s about time that some media outlet made it really, really clear what this budget impass is costing us in real money. Below is the bottom line on the Bee’s piece. But it is worth reading the whole thing.

The fiscal crunch grows by $3.3 million per day because the state budget anticipated that a deal on how to cut $1.2 billion from prisons would be struck in July, not mired in politics for months.

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WHILE THE MONEY DRAINS OUT, WILL CALIFORNIA HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE SUPREMES?

Monday, the San Jose Mercury News had this report about the various court battles shaping up around many of these same prison issues:

California officials Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a lower court order that forces the state to quickly devise a plan to shed more than 40,000 inmates from its overcrowded prisons.

In a 46-page petition to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who handles emergency appeals from the Western states, California Attorney General Jerry Brown asked for an immediate stay of a three-judge panel’s Aug. 4 order requiring the state to submit its prisoner release plan within 45 days.

Judges on the federal court panel Thursday rejected the state’s bid for a stay, saying they’ve been “more than patient with the state and its officials” in the years-long legal battle over conditions inside California’s prison system.

But California officials say the court has put the state in an impossible spot by requiring it to come up with a plan to reduce the prison population by one-fourth by Sept. 18.

“Every day that the three-judge court’s order hangs over California, it places enormous strains on the state’s existing resources and creates intolerable anxiety for both officials and residents of the nation’s most populous state,” state lawyers wrote to Kennedy.

State officials are asking Kennedy to put the order on hold while they appeal the entire ruling to the Supreme Court in the coming month.

Given that the state is hemorrhaging money daily, Doug Berman over at Sentencing, Law and Policy wants to know if the Supremes will be willing to hurry:

In other words, everyone says for a variety of reasons that time is of the essence in these matters. Thus, it would seem important for Justice Kennedy and/or the entire Supreme Court to move quickly to rule in some manner concerning this California prison litigation. And yet SCOTUS is not an institution known for moving very fast on others’ timelines. Thus, I will be intrigued to see not only how, but when, SCOTUS responds to California’s emergency filing.

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THE RECESSION BEHIND BARS

An Op Ed in the NY Times by an inmate and writer named Kenneth Hartman, who is doing life in the California state prison at Lancaster, talks about the affect of the recession on life inside the state’s 33 lock-ups.

Here are some clips.

The first inkling of financial difficulties in here surfaced in the chow hall. All of a sudden prison officials became concerned about our overeating. In the last couple of years, our brown plastic trays have started to look and feel a lot emptier. Even the old staples, beans and rice, shrank into bite-sized portions. Luxury items like frosted cake and meat cut from the carcass of a once-living thing vanished. The new menus, chock full of potatoes and meat substitutes, seem right out of a Spartan’s cookbook.

[SNIP]

The last time I received a visit from my family, in early July, the air-conditioning in the visiting room had been broken for more than a month. This matters because my prison is in the high desert north of Los Angeles. Temperatures here in the summer commonly rise above 100 dusty, windy degrees. Pack 150 people into an airless room and you’ve got the makings for human meltdown. Two industrial-sized fans only made a hot situation noisy, too.

The next day I asked one of the administrators what could be done to get the air-conditioning fixed, and he told me an amazing story. The free-world contractor who services the prison’s air-conditioning systems had refused to come out to replace the part that was broken, because the state owed the company tens of thousands of dollars in back fees and could pay only in i.o.u.’s. There would be no cool air until the state’s budget negotiations were concluded.