CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“BEST BUDGET IDEA? LETTING SICK, ELDERLY CONVICTS GO”
Sometimes it can
take more than a decade for a completely sensible idea to catch on. So it is
with what may be the single best money-saving idea in the inventive preliminary
budget proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown in early January.
That idea, part of
a Brown plan to appease a panel of federal judges, calls for the possible
parole of several thousand convicts who are sick or mentally impaired, plus a
new parole program for elderly prisoners. This is spurred by the judges’ demand
for even more releases of state prison inmates than the 22,000-plus already
returned to their counties.
But it’s an idea
first proposed to this column in 2002 by reader Ray Procunier, then a Grass
Valley resident. Procunier, who died two years ago at age 86, was director of
corrections in California under Gov. Ronald Reagan and during part of Brown’s
first term in the 1970s. He also headed the prison systems of Texas and Utah.
“When Reagan was
governor, we cut the prison population by one-third and there was no increase
in crime, not even a blip,” he said 11 years ago, responding to a column.
“I guarantee I could cut down today’s prison population by 100,000 or more and
not hurt a soul in the process.”
Among his chief
suggestions was the wholesale parole of prisoners over age 55, regardless of
the Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out law or their specific sentences. He would have
kept murderers, rapists and other serious sex offenders behind bars unless they
had serious chronic illnesses. These tactics alone, Procunier said, would cut prison
costs by more than $4 billion – equivalent to at least $5 billion in today’s
dollars.
Now that Brown has
made almost exactly the same idea a central point of his plan to comply with
the court ruling on prison crowding, one big question is why it took so long
for this idea to percolate to the surface. The most likely answer is inertia,
along with a fear component, as no politician ever wants to appear soft on
crime. That proclivity also helped produce Three-Strikes and to increase the
state’s prison population from about 25,000 in 1980 to 170,000-plus in 2008. It
took the court order to cut that down a bit.
So far, as
Procunier predicted, there has been no significant statewide crime increase as
a result of the early paroles. Releasing the sick and elderly would likely have
a similar negligible impact.
That’s because
national criminal statistics show most violent crimes are committed by persons
in their teens, 20s and 30s, and very few by persons aged 55 or over. At the
same time, the cost of maintaining hospitalized inmates ranges between $68,000
and $125,000 per year, depending on where they are treated. That’s
significantly more than the average annual cost of about $47,000 for the
typical healthy convict.
So far, 15 other
states acting on this kind of information have begun expediting release of
elderly prisoners, who can use pensions, savings, Social Security, welfare or
the resources of relatives to cover expenses outside custody. Most ill inmates
released early can be covered almost immediately by Medi-Cal under Obamacare,
while the state gains not only prison space, but also can stop posting guards
in each of their hospital rooms around the clock, required for prisoners
hospitalized outside the prison system.
That’s why the new
Brown plan makes so much sense, both as a means of helping comply with the
court order and saving many millions, perhaps billions, of prison dollars. Too
bad other California governors didn’t have the good sense to do this many years
ago, when Procunier first suggested it.
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Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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