Analyst estimates $100 million more in Prop. 47 savings than Brown

The Legislature’s non-partisan fiscal analyst believes Gov. Jerry Brown is underestimating the amount of savings from Proposition 47, the controversial ballot initiative that reduced some nonviolent drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

The initiative required the savings be used for mental health, drug treatment, truancy and victim services. In a report issued Friday, the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that the first deposit should be about $100 million more than what the state Department of Finance has accounted for.

In his January budget proposal, Brown set aside $29.3 million for the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Fund – $62.7 million in savings from inmate and caseload reduction, minus $33.4 million for resentencing and increased parole capacity.

The vast gap is mainly due to different methods for calculating prison costs. Thousands of inmates have been resentenced and released from state facilities under Proposition 47, pushing California’s overcrowded corrections system just under a court-mandated capacity.

Brown’s budget estimates that the average daily inmate population is about 4,700 fewer this year because of the law. But the Legislative Analyst’s Office noted that, to stay below capacity levels, most of those potential prisoners would have had to be contracted out to beds in other states, which would have set the state back an additional $83 million.

The LAO also said the governor is likely underestimate the savings from fewer felony cases being filed and overestimating the cost of reclassifying the records of former offenders who already served out their felony terms.

Via: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article60119951.html 

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Analyst says Jerry Brown's prison plan is short-term fix

Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to reduce prison overcrowding may satisfy a looming federal deadline but it does not represent a durable long-term solution, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.

In a victory for the Brown administration, the federal panel adjudicating the struggle over California's prison overcrowding recently gave the state two more years to reduce its population to constitutional levels.

While the LAO concludes that California is on pace to slip under the federal cap, the nonpartisan analyst faulted Brown's plan for relying too much on the use of county jails and private prisons. Brown's budget would spend $481 million to place just under 17,000 inmates in so-called contract beds .

A strategy combining contract beds with other changes, such as increasing good time credits and expanding parole for the elderly, inmates with serious medical conditions and second-strikers, will likely get California under a federally-mandated cap by the new 2016 deadline, the LAO found.

But the state's prison population is projected to climb again in subsequent years. Relying on contract beds will also place a costly burden on the state, the LAO argues, to the tune of about $500 million annually.

"The plan contains relatively few measures that would help the state maintain long-term compliance other than relying indefinitely on costly contract beds," the report concludes.

Given those risks, the LAO urged the Legislature to craft some longer-term policy solutions. 

Its recommendations include reducing certain sentences and converting some crimes to "wobblers" that can be charged either as misdemeanors or felonies -- an approach Brown vetoed last year - allowing inmates to earn more early release credits for good behavior, and expanding programs that allow adult men to serve part of their sentences outside of state prison.

The two-year extension, granted earlier this month, came after the governor secured legislative approval last year of his package allocating $315 million to house excess inmates.

But because California received the two-year extension, Brown's budget proposes taking some of the money approved last year to house more inmates and depositing it instead into a Recidivism Reduction Fund.

Specifically, Brown's budget also proposes channeling just under $50 million from the recidivism fund into re-entry hubs and around $30 million on substance abuse, rehabilitation and mental illness programs.

That infusion might help for the coming budget year, but it will quickly exhaust the recidivism fund, the LAO said. To sustain the types of programs Brown proposes funding, the Legislature would need to continue dipping into the General Fund on an annual basis.

"The Governor's budget proposals create or expand programs that would require ongoing funding to effectively reduce the prison population," the LAO report estimates.

The LAO also rejected both the governor's plan to fund re-entry hubs, which use education and treatment to prepare inmates nearing the end of their terms to reintegrate into society. 

The report cast doubt on whether re-entry hubs effectively reduce recidivism.
Similarly, the report urged the governor to discard his plan to spend $11.3 million on integrated drug treatment, calling the program unproven and overly costly.

Instead, the LAO recommends diverting the $60 million set aside for those two programs towards an initiative rewarding counties that keep paroled felons from returning to state prisons.


PHOTO: Inmates inside the jail cells in the old Stanislaus County downtown main jail in Modesto on Wednesday June 19, 2013.The Sacramento Bee/Manny Crisostomo.

Hike in California 'car tax' would raise up to $4 billion

A proposed ballot measure to more than double California's vehicle license fee would raise $3 billion to $4 billion annually for state and local transportation programs, according to estimates by the Legislative Analyst's Office.

Both versions of the proposed ballot measure by Transportation California would phase in a surcharge to the fee, charging motorists an extra one percent of the vehicle's value each year. The fee has been .65 percent of a vehicle's market value since the late 1990s, with a temporary increase to 1.15 percent from May 2009 through June 2011.

Transportation California's Will Kempton, a former Caltrans director, has said that the measure's supporters will decide this month whether to commit the money to gather signatures to qualify the proposal for the November 2014 ballot. Signature collection could begin after the release of titles and summaries for the measure, which is expected Jan. 13.

Proponents would have up to 150 days to collect 807,615 valid voter signatures to qualify for the 2014 ballot.

PHOTO: Traffic runs along the southbound 110 Freeway towards downtown Los Angeles, April 28, 2005. Associated Press/ Mark J. Terrill