I have been a little surprised to find out the extent to which the statewide Democratic politicians in California seem to be completely in the pocket of the prison guards union. It helps to explain why a state with so many progressive ideas floating around seems to be so insanely regressive on crime and criminals. If the supposed liberals in your state aren’t going to provide leadership, no one else will. You can generally expect the Republicans to call for public stoning and witch burning and little else on the topic of crime. Prior to last weekend when I filled out my ballot, I knew damn little about Prop 5. I had only seen negative ads where Dianne Feinstein and Jerry Brown call it a “drug dealer’s bill of rights” and otherwise bash it.

Based on what was in the ballot, I couldn’t see why they were treating it that way. It seemed like good policy to me. Sometimes these ballot initiatives have some fatal flaw that makes an otherwise good bit of public policy into an absolute terrible implementation of it. When I did my research, I couldn’t find a fatal flaw. This bill would greatly increase the number of non-violent drug offenders who get a shot at treatment instead of going to jail. This would mean spending less money on building new prisons and reversing the ugly trend in this state toward putting huge chunks of our population behind bars. This is a good idea. It’s a damn shame that the prison guards’ union can’t see past their own immediate pocketbook interest on this one. This is the equivalent of corporate CEOs who only look at this quarter. Ultimately, the prison guards themselves will be better off if we can reduce the number of people going into prison for non-violent drug crimes. We might someday be able to afford to restore the programs that actually rehabilitate other offenders. That would make the day to day job of prison guards a safer, better job and it would make the communities where they live safer, better communities.

If you’re in California and haven’t voted yet, I urge you to vote yes on 5.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm and is filed under blog, California Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.