Image via Istock. used with permissonCalifornia prison spending for 2023-24 in the proposed $297 billion state budget is up to $14.5 billion – even as the prisoner population drops.
Headquarters of the California Democratic Party in Sacramento. (Photo: cadem.org)The head of the California Democratic Party says the CDP will no longer accept political contributions from private prison corporations. Party Chair Eric Bauman said any contributions received since May 21, 2017 would be “donated to organizations doing critical work to protect immigrants from the Trump administration or to support and rehabilitate recently incarcerated folks.”
Workers at a large construction site in San Jose. (Photo: pbk-pg, via Shutterstock)OPINION: It’s taken an army of firefighters to battle California’s historic infernos. It will take an even larger army to rebuild the Golden State from the devastation. Even with all of the current skilled construction workers, California will need to train more to achieve our goals of getting families back in their homes and communities.
An inmate gestures through the bars of his prison cell. (Photo: Sakhorn, Shutterstock)OPINION: In all the justifications for the new measures going in under Beard’s watch, the Corrections Secretary never mentions the well-known, privately acknowledged fact that while visitors may bring in small amounts of drugs, the importation of trafficable amounts of drugs comes in not through visitors, but through staff at the prisons, including custody staff.
California won a two-year extension to meet a federal court order to cut its prison population, but a three-judge panel made clear Monday that it has doubts about the state’s handling of prison overcrowding. A three-judge federal panel accepted Gov. Jerry Brown’s new plan to reduce the population, but reprimanded the state for its delay in finding what they described as a “durable” solution to the prison crisis. The state has put inmates in out-of-state prisons and private custody.
State prison officials say some 12,400 California inmates at more than two dozen prisons are participating in a hunger strike to protest conditions behind bars.
The tally provided by the Corrections Department is less than half the amount – 29,000 to 30,000 – that has been cited in published reports of inmates as participating in