Schwarzenegger's budget: up with prisons, down with communities

[Judi Lynn]

11/06


Schwarzenegger's budget: up with prisons, down with communities

Sacramento - In his budget released today, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stuck to an old script: increasing funding for the state's massively troubled prison system. Elected on a platform that promised to "blow up boxes," the governor continues to fall in line with expensive and ineffective "tough on crime" policies despite widespread voter frustration at pouring ever more resources into a failed prison system.

While many of California's students struggle in drastically overcrowded and under-funded schools and nearly 1 million children live without health insurance, this year's budget proposes building more prisons. "It has become more apparent that the governor's priorities are with corporations, not communities, and definitely not with making fiscally responsible decisions," commented Susan Burton, executive director of the New Way of Life Foundation in Los Angeles.

The governor's budget and last week's announcement of a proposed $12 billion, 90,000-cell prison and jail expansion project suggest that the governor's mantra of following the people lacks meaningful public safety funding. Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, prison expert at USC, explains, "Building more prisons and jails will actually undermine the state's efforts to produce wealth, the point of investment in infrastructure. State and local governments will be forced to waste resources for decades repaying the bonds and hiring more jail staff, leading to continuing neglect of productive infrastructure like schools, hospitals and mass transit."
(snip/...)

http://www.sfbayview.com/011106/schwarzenegersbudget011106.shtml

[EST]

1. How long before all of California recognizes

this typical, unimaginative, shit-for-brains r/w idiot for what he is?

Indict and convict Drier.

[DarkmoonIkonoklast]

2. Reaganomics redux

Does anyone else recall when Reagan, the original Governator, cut the California State welfare budget?

He pushed "Man-In-The-House" legislation, forcing low-income families to break up or lose their welfare checks, resulting in Daddy, (seeing his kids starving) turning to crime to provide food or medicine, thus "proving the point" that "welfare people were nothing more than criminals"...

Does anyone also recall that Reagan presided over the largest increase in the state Prison Budget in California history?

[newyawker99]

3. Hi DarkmoonIkonoklast!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast: