California is spending nearly half a billion dollars more on corrections than it did four years ago, even though state prisons house almost 30,000 fewer inmates,according to a study released late Monday by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Add $1 billion the state will allocate to counties this fiscal year as part of its prison realignment program, and spending on corrections is at an “all time high.”
“The state has had to increase spending on healthcare in prisons,” said PPIC researcher Magnus Lofstrum. “That has contributed to a high level of expenditures.”
In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court required California to dramatically reduce overcrowding and improve healthcare inside prisons. The court majority said conditions had fallen “below the standard of decency" to the point of being unconstitutional.
To decrease overcrowding, California implemented prison realignment — which shifted responsibility for punishing lower level felons to county governments.
[For more of this story, written by Frank Stoltze, go to http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/...nmate-population-pl/]
Comments (0)