Californians United for a Responsible Budget

Editorial, Rampant Spending—State Prisons Hold Taxpayers Hostage, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 18, 2004.

It's bad enough that the state Department of Corrections has been basically immune from budget cuts. And that the department overspent its bloated budget by 10 percent last year. And that from 1990 to 2002 department overspending totaled $1.6 billion.

Now we learn from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office that during the last three years the department's budget grew at a faster rate than the inmate population. It seems the problem-plagued prison system hired 1,000 additional guards at a cost of roughly $100 million without permission from the Legislature.

If that doesn't give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger added leverage in his drive to renegotiate the prison guards' union contract, then nothing will. That sweetheart deal cut with former Gov. Gray Davis showered the union with a 7 percent pay increase this year and a 10 percent hike next year while the jobs of thousands of state employees are being terminated. Factor in the guards' lucrative fringe benefits, which include a very generous sick leave policy, and one can see the reason for those extra hires. So slack is that policy that prison managers cannot even require guards who miss a great deal of work to submit medical excuses to support their absences.

Then again, the padding of prison budgets is nothing new. Last year this newspaper noted how the California Youth Authority had basically maintained its budget of a decade ago despite being responsible for nearly 50 percent fewer inmates.

Which brings us back to Schwarzenegger, whose first budget includes $446 million in unspecified cuts for the prison system. He already has taken a page from the Davis playbook by diverting $453 million from the general fund to cover the cost of overtime for prison guards and for other cost overruns. The governor should now cut the Gordian knot with the politically powerful prison guards' union by gaining contract concessions.

Schwarzenegger's hand has been greatly strengthened by a series of revelations about a prison system riven by internal problems. Fully two-thirds of the system's spending last year went for personnel costs. One need not be a fiscal wizard to discern that these costs should not be increasing so rapidly when the state's prison population is decreasing.

Basically, it boils down to holding the state prison system strictly accountable for its actions. The Schwarzenegger administration, which has taken some steps to rein in the rampant abuse of prisoners, needs to move no less aggressively against a system that for far too long has been an fiscal entity unto itself.