Why Is California Fighting the Release of Non-Violent Inmates? Cheap Labor.

California has had a prison
overcrowding problem for years and has been ordered, repeatedly, to
reduce the problem, so bad it has been determined to be cruel and
unusual punishment.

California hasn’t done a particularly good job at meeting goals
(maybe the recent passage of
Proposition 47 might help). Federal judges have ordered them to
expand the parole program to let more folks out and determined that
the state had not implemented an order from all the way back in
February.

The Los Angeles Times reported the order, along with
this rather interesting explainer of why the state was resisting

letting prisoners out early:

Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and
in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents
per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in
court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would
lose an important labor pool.

Prisoners’ lawyers countered that the corrections department
could hire public employees to do the work.

So, yeah, that’s a pretty horrifying argument for keeping people
in overcrowded prisons. Adam Serwer followed up over at
BuzzFeed, and Harris is pulling a page from President
Barack Obama’s playbook.
She says she had no idea this was going on:

“I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this
morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the
way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred
in court,” Harris told BuzzFeed News in an interview Monday. “I was
very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we
actually say in court.”

Serwer identifies the actual attorney responsible for the
argument as Deputy Attorney General Patrick McKinney. His argument
extends even further than what the Times reported.
California uses thousands of prisoners to help fight wildfires,
each paid $2 a day. In a roundabout fashion, releasing prisoners
early could reduce the number of firefighters they’d have
available. Read more
here.

The feds did not find the arguments compelling. To me, what’s
fascinating (and scary) is what’s going to happen when the state
does indeed have to hire hundreds, possibly thousands of new public
employees to do the work they were getting on the cheap. These
employees will, of course, be unionized, well-paid (in comparison
with both the prisoners and what they’d get in the private sector)
and would qualify for some very nice pensions that would put
California even further in debt. It could possibly demolish Gov.
Jerry Brown’s (already inaccurate) claims the state no longer has a
budget deficit.

Oh, and as a reminder: California raised its minimum wage to $9
an hour in July. It goes up to $10 an hour in 2016.