Posted on 01/14/2006 7:12:17 PM PST by Amerigomag
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Driven by a rising inmate population, prison spending in California is scheduled to exceed $8 billion this year. But the real intrigue in the state's 2006-07 corrections budget is in what it's proposing for the near- and long-term future Spelled out in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's summary on the spending plan is a proposal "to pursue authority to secure additional inmate capacity through contracts with other providers." The wording is fleshed out in the actual budget bill, which calls for a virtual doubling in the number of private prison beds in California, from the current 8,500 to an estimated 17,000 over the next two years.
Schwarzenegger's "strategic growth plan," meanwhile, lays out a bond-funded, decade-long, $12 billion jail and prison construction proposal that would create space for 83,000 additional inmates. About a third of that number, 27,000, are projected to be short-term parole violators who would be housed in county facilities instead of in state prisons, according to the governor's Department of Finance. Together, the shift of the parolees to county jails and the construction of the new private prison beds would eliminate the need for at least seven prisons based on the current population average of about 5,000 per institution that would otherwise have to be built to house the projected inmate increase over the next decade.
Already, the proposals have raised red flags with the politically-influential California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The union currently represents some 30,000 prison officers, but would lose out on thousands of additional dues-paying members if the administration follows through with its private prisons and county jails plan.
(Excerpt) Read more at shns.com ...
Good ole union. Don't help the taxpayer out except out of more of their money.
Who the heck let the unions into the state government???
They own us now.
Can we give them their walking papers.
They are nothing but a bunch of thugs.
In Washington State the legislature mandated that state employees must belong to the union to hold a state job. Barf. Of course we all know that this is payback for union support for their election to office.
Jerry Brown and his chief of staff, Gray Davis.
Thanks, I just remember, my father worked for the DMV. They were NOT union. So I didn't know when this happened. No wonder we can't make any changes in Sacramento. The Unions own the state.
Anything that is not of the Unions interest, is a NO GO. Looks like we've lost our government here folks.
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