Prison funding is key budget battle, as guards’ union’s power has waned

Prison funding emerged as a key point of difference as Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative Democrats hammer out a coronavirus-battered budget.

In terms of sheer dollar amounts, the $146 million Senate Democrats have proposed taking from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation amounts to far less than their disputes over billions of dollars in education funding.

But these numbers might shed light on several long-term trends in Sacramento. These include a decline in the power of the prison guards' union, Democrats increasing willingness to defy the wishes of law enforcement organizations, and strong relationships Newsom has built with some of those same groups.

There could also be more recent factors in play. For instance, Newsom needs to cooperation of law enforcement as he seeks to maintain control of the state's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

That cooperation could be waning. Last Tuesday, Sheriff Don Barnes told the Orange County Board of Supervisors he would not enforce a policy requiring masks in public, saying, "We are not the mask police."

Sonoma County Sheriff-Coroner Mark Essick announced on Thursday he would no longer enforce shelter-in-place orders from county health officials, though he reversed course the next day.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association remains a powerful force in Sacramento. The group spent $2.8 million to help Newsom win the governorship in 2018.

The group's Independent Expenditure Committee also spent $1,175,000 to help elect Tony Thurmond as Superintendent of Public Instruction. The move appeared to be motivated by an ad run by Thurmond's opponent, fellow Democrat Marshall Tuck, which appeared to advocate the very thing Senate Democrats now want to do: take money from the prisons budget and giving it to schools.

While the donation to Newsom might surprise some, it comes more than two decades after it put $2 million into the effort to elect Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 1998. That marked a sudden shift from the union's support for tough-on-crime Republican governors like Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian, and came years before California transitioned to virtual one-party rule by Democrats. Davis would go on to sign legislation giving prison guards a significant pay and pension increase, bringing them into parity with the California High Patrol.

But it is widely acknowledged the group does not wield the same outsized power it did from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The union was a key factor in pushing tough-on-crime measures that filled state prisons, led to higher spending and eventually saw the corrections system falling under orders from federal judges to improve inmate mental health care and address overcrowding.

It was under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that the group's influence began to wane. The man who swept Davis out of office in a 2003 recall did not exclude the guards from his efforts to reduce state employee pay and pensions.

But the key turning points likely came in 2006, the year the state prison population peaked at 163,000. Schwarzenegger also declared a state of emergency over prison overcrowding, then won reelection by a 17% margin. This was also the year a federal court put a federal receiver in charge of prison health care in the state in the case now known as Plata v. Newsom, 4:01-cv-01351-JST (N.D. Cal., filed April 5, 2001). The corrections peace officers briefly mounted a recall campaign against him in 2008.

But Newsom has shown his is willing to defy police unions, perhaps most dramatically last August when he signed AB 392, a bill changing the standard for when police can lawfully use deadly force.

The California Correctional Peace Offices Association and the Association of California Highway Patrolmen did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment for this article.

Newsom's May 14 budget revision states his goal of stopping intakes to the Department of Juvenile Justice on Jan. 1 and closing two adult prisons in the next three years, leading to ongoing savings of $400 million.

Further cuts to the prisons department could force it to release more prisoners and close prisons, things many Democrats have wanted for a long time. At a recent budget hearing, Sen. John Moorlach, D-Costa Mesa, called the prison department cuts a "bluff" designed to pressure the federal government to backfill strained state budgets.

Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, raised the issue of prisons department funding at a hearing of the budget subcommittee overseeing public safety, which she chairs. She said the general fund reduction to the department was less than 1%. In terms of the $13.2 billion in funding to the department itself, she was correct.

However, Newsom's overall cuts to the programs listed under "corrections" total almost $591 million, or about 3.6%. Much of this is focused on nearly $2.8 billion in funding to a group of programs including local community corrections, Juvenile Justice programs and district attorney and public defender support. A prisons department spokesperson declined last week to comment on the proposed cuts, but some Democrats have already raised concerns that slashing funds for reentry programs could result in more recidivism.

Skinner was also right that other areas of the state budget would see far deeper cuts under Newsom's plan. K-12 education would lose 19.9%, higher education 10.1%, and general government 28.8%.

The Department of Justice would see a 2.1% drop in its $1.1 billion budget under Newsom's revised plan. The California Highway Patrol would also mostly escape the budget ax with a 0.5% drop in its nearly $2.6 billion annual budget.

The Senate Democrats' counter-proposal did not propose any further cuts to these agencies.

Any prison cuts would come at a difficulty time for the prisons department as it faces pressure to reduce overcrowding to fight the spread of the virus. As of May 28, the agency had reported 952 cases among inmates. At least nine inmates have died of the virus at the California Institution for Men in Chino.

The opposing sides in a long-running case on prison mental health care met once again for a status conference on Friday in Coleman v. Newsom, 2:90-cv-00520-KJM-DB (E.D. Cal., filed April 23, 1990). The plaintiffs have been seeking to force the release on additional prisoners beyond the approximately 3,000 people let out of prisons early in order to reduce overcrowding to fight the spread of COVID-19s.

Newsom's May budget summary claims a greater reduction, once reduced intakes are taken into account: "As of May 6, 2020, the adult inmate population was 117,498, compared to 122,941 as of March 25, 2020, a reduction of 5,443 inmates."

"We do watch the budget very closely," said Michael W. Bien, a plaintiffs' attorney in the Coleman case as a partner with Rosen Bien & Galvan LLP in San Francisco, when reached on Friday.

This has to do with a paradox that has come up in the litigation: The plaintiffs have repeatedly said the prisons lack the resources necessary to fully protect inmates' mental and physical health at current population levels. Closing prisons is necessary in order to reduce the department's budgets due to the "fixed costs" involved in running an institution, Bien said, but will also lead to worse overcrowding if population isn't reduced.

But Bien said his side has repeatedly been argued the state should release older inmates who cost the system a disproportionate amount of money, face a heightened risk for COVID and pose little risk of committing new crimes when released. Many of these people committed serious crimes, he said, but did so as long ago as the 1950s.

But Newsom has shown his is willing to defy police unions, perhaps most dramatically last August when he signed AB 392, a bill changing the standard for when police can lawfully use deadly force.