Ramesh, it’s also worth noting that the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has done enormous harm in California, essentially holding criminal justice reform hostage. From a piece I wrote a couple years ago:
In a state where more than two-thirds of crime is attributable to recidivism, CCPOA has spent millions of dollars lobbying against rehabilitation programs, favoring instead policies that will grow the inmate population and the ranks of prison-guard unions. In 1999, it successfully killed a pilot program for alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders. In 2005, it helped kill Schwarzenegger’s plan to reduce overcrowding by putting up to 20,000 inmates in a rehabilitation program. It opposes any tinkering with the “three strikes law” that might thin the prison rolls.
According to UCLA economist Lee E. Ohanian in a illuminating paper for The American, “America’s Public Sector Union Dilemma,” California’s corrections officers have exploited their monopoly labor power to push policies that will expand the prison population and, as a result, the demand for guards who just happen to be the best-paid corrections officers in the country. That’s why, contrary to what the Marxist sages would expect, they’ve successfully kept privately run prisons out of the state.
Meanwhile, incarceration costs in the essentially bankrupt state are exploding. California spends $44,000 per inmate, compared with the national average of $28,000. A state prison nurse exploited overtime rules to earn $269,810 in one year.