Experts Expound

“Gov. Brown says federal oversight of the California prison system is a waste of money, sucks up critical state resources and should come to an immediate end.  What do you think?”

The numbers tell the story. The state is spending $2 billion a year on prison healthcare while being forced to cut programs law-abiding Californians. A Rhode Island attorney is getting very rich in the process. Time to cut the cord!

The governor is trying his best to get out from under years of this. If he can get the Feds to deal with what has been a huge battle for the state, why not?  It would not offend voters, helps his bottom line and puts the onus on others for failures. Only question I have is what will CCPOA think of this?

The prisons are a lose-lose for everyone involved, state or federal. The governor is making a mistake injecting California back into its role of prison health-care administrator, which is what got us in this mess in the first place.

If it’s good enough for health care it’s good enough for prisons

If the state had managed the prison system even moderately well, there would have been no need for federal oversight. Arnold promised to clean up the prison situation and he only made it worse.  Brown’s got an interesting history on this subject. As governor, he wants to download inmates in state prisons to local jails.  But as mayor of Oakland, he closed the city jails and offloaded the inmates to the county of Alameda. Was the latter “subsidiarity”?  Also, Brown himself has admitted that his approval of determinate sentencing as governor the first time led to the huge increase in the state prison population. He has little credibility on this subject.

Governor Brown is right.  The state is working through AB 109 in attempt to address these issues.  The federal courts should see this and end the oversight of the state prison system.

He is right and so was Governor Schwarzenegger when he said the same thing throughout his tenure.

He’s right.  Ask someone what conditions are like in the U.S. Navy submarine service, but then they call that “serving our country.”

The federal receivership may have been a laudable idea in response to prison problems, but in practice it has been a disaster, an exercise in bureaucratic empire building that has done little except spend a lot of money at a time when the state had no money to spend. It can’t disappear soon enough.

Why on earth would anyone have thought the feds capable of managing a prison health-care system? These are the same folks who brought you the budget debacle, the debt-ceiling debacle and, now, the sequester debacle.

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Ed’s Note: Those from whom we sought opinions include Andrew Acosta, Elizabeth Ashford, Hector Barajas, A.G. Block, Mark Bogetich, Barry Brokaw, Richard Costigan, Dale Debber, Peter DeMarco, Mike Donovan, Jim Evans, Kathy Fairbanks, Jeff Fuller, Rex Frazier, Tom Gede, Ken Gibson, Evan Goldberg, Deborah Gonzalez, Sandy Harrison, Bob Hertzberg, Gale Kaufman, Jason Kinney, Dave Lesher, Elizabeth Leslie, Chris Lehane, Greg Lucas, Donna Lucas, Mike Madrid, Aaron McLear, Nicole Mahrt, Steve Maviglio,  Adam Mendelsohn, Jacob Mejia, Beth Miller, Paul Mitchell , Barbara O’Connor, Kassy Perry, Jack Pitney, Adam Probolsky, Tony Quinn, Matt Rexroad, Matt Ross, Roger Salazar, Dan Schnur, Will Shuck, Ray Sotero, Garry South, Kevin Spillane, Robin Swanson, Ben Tulchin, Angie Wei, Scott Wetch.