In next week’s issue of the New Yorker (April 11), the magazine’s legal writer, Jeffery Toobin, has a MUST READ story about SCOTUS’ view of campaign reform.
It is an interesting and important read, but not exactly a cheery one:
Below I have posted a few salient clips but the whole thing is worth your time:
[SNIP]
Eight of the current Supreme Court Justices are known for their zeal in questioning lawyers. That tendency was on display last week during the oral argument over the constitutionality of an Arizona law known as the Citizens Clean Elections Act, a law that attempts to do a little something about campaigns in which one candidate has a great deal more money than the others. Roughly, the law says that the ones who are outspent should receive a modest subsidy from state funds. By the end of the questioning, however, it had become clear that a majority of the Justices will probably declare the Arizona law unconstitutional. In apparent frustration, Justice Stephen G. Breyer departed from custom and allowed himself a despairing comment about the Court’s treatment of campaign-finance laws, which he has long, and mostly futilely, defended. “It is better to say it’s all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don’t know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another,” he said.In many other respects, this Court’s commitment to free speech is admirable. Earlier this year, Chief Justice John Roberts gave voice to the best American tradition of tolerance when he (along with seven colleagues) overturned a damage award against a fringe religious group. The Westboro Baptist Church, which, as it happens, is more of an extended family than an actual church, had launched one of its odious anti-gay publicity stunts near a funeral at which a mother and father were grieving the loss of a son in Iraq. Understandably, perhaps, a judge had awarded five million dollars in a civil suit brought by the father, but the Court recognized that such a judgment threatened the free-speech rights of all unpopular groups. “Speech is powerful,” Roberts wrote, but it was the Court’s duty “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
The problem is that there is more than one way to stifle public debate. The idea behind limiting campaign contributions and expenditures is to insure that the voices of the wealthy don’t drown out the voices of those who are less well off. A surreal moment during the Arizona argument summed up how peculiar the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence has become. Springing a well-planned trap, Roberts told the lawyer defending the Arizona law, “I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission Web site this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, ‘level the playing field’ when it comes to running for office. Why isn’t that clear evidence that it’s unconstitutional?” To many ears, levelling the playing field hardly sounds like a sinister activity, worthy of the Supreme Court’s ultimate sanction. Indeed, as recently as 1990 the Court upheld a campaign-finance law because of “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” But the Court explicitly overruled that decision last year in the Citizens United case. For better or for worse, Roberts is right: leveling the playing field is now verboten.
JERRY BROWN SIGNS BILL SENDING THOUSANDS OF NONVIOLENT PRISONERS BACK TO JAIL TO SERVE OUT THEIR TIME
Yeah, I’m sure this sounded great on paper. And I’m all for doing whatever is necessary to reduce the California state prison population. But all this new plan seems to be is simply moving prisoners around in some kind of shell game strategy in which the county jails take the hit instead of the state prisons—a hit that LA’s county Jail system, for one, really cannot take right now.
Here’s a clip from Jack Dolan’s story for the LA times.
Tens of thousands of felons convicted of nonviolent crimes would serve their time in county jails instead of state prisons under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday evening.
The measure is designed to reduce the number of inmates in California’s chronically overcrowded state lockups and keep relatively low-level offenders closer to their homes, where drug treatment and mental health services are believed to be more effective.
Supporters hope to save taxpayers money by lowering the number of offenders who return to prison and by housing many parole violators in less expensive county jails.
“For too long, the state’s prison system has been a revolving doorr for lower-level offenders and parole violators who are released within months,” Brown said in a news release. “Cycling these offenders through state prisons wastes money, aggravates crowded conditions, thwarts rehabilitation and impedes local law enforcement supervision.
Sounds dandy. Unfortunately, however, the county jails have even less in the way of rehabilitation and other programs than the California prisons, so this bill is going to help our recidivism rate how exactly?
We need sentencing reform if we want to reduce CA’s prison population.
….AND SPEAKING OF SENTENCING REFORM, THERE IS THIS FROM FORBES MAGAZINE
Here’s a relevant clip from the Forbes report:
…Republican governors and lawmakers pushed for many of the policies that put low-level drug offenders and nonviolent felons behind bars and extended sentences for many convicted criminals. But with the GOP in control of more financially strapped state governments, a growing number of Republican elected officials favor a review of the sentencing laws that contributed to a fourfold increase in prison costs over two decades.
The total cost of incarcerating state inmates swelled from $12 billion in 1988 to more than $50 billion by 2008.
Newly elected Republican governors in Florida and Georgia are among those pushing sentencing reforms. Brent Steele, a Republican state senator in Indiana, concedes that lawmakers share the blame for driving up state prison costs in recent years. High-profile crimes prompt lawmakers and governors to adopt ever-tougher criminal sentencing, such as three-strikes laws that impose minimum mandatory sentences for those convicted of a third felony, no matter the offense.
“But with that eventually comes the time when we run out of prison space,” said Steele, who is sponsoring a criminal justice overhaul in his state, prompted by budget concerns. “So what do you do? You concentrate on incarcerating those we’re afraid of and not those we’re just mad at.”
I want that last sentence on refrigerator magnets so we can give ’em out in Sac’to.
Once again, in California, we not only cannot persuade our Republican lawmakers to go along with sentencing reform—we can’t get the Dems show a little spine on the topic either.
(Dear Georgia and Florida Repubs, can’t you talk sense to these people? Seriously. It would mean a lot to us.)