Guarding Against Reform

CA's Corrections Officers Need to Let Some of Their Charges Go

California’s prisons provide an apt metaphor for the state’s broken politics. Almost everyone knows the $10 billion correctional system is unsustainable and must be cut, and yet the issue is so controlled by vested interests that nothing much changes. It’s a case study in how political disengagement – the “why bother” syndrome that afflicts Californians when confronted with any number of daunting issues – tends to carry the day.

Contracting the prison population requires shortening prison and parole terms, increasing alternatives to imprisonment, and reserving costly prison beds for the most …