« Race is a factor in this election | Main | NEW POLL: Americans Oppose Mandatory Minimums,Will Vote for Candidates Who Feel the Same »
October 02, 2008
CA: Billions for building jails may not materialize
Billions for building jails may not materialize
By Hudson Sangree - hsangree@sacbee.com
Thursday, October 2, 2008
As residents of rural Yolo County fight a proposal to build a re-entry prison near Madison, billions of dollars in funding for prison and jail construction are in jeopardy statewide.
State lawmakers failed to vote on a bill last month that would have allowed the state to issue more than $7 billion in bonds to finance thousands of new prison and jail beds.
Meanwhile, the nation's credit crisis has put in doubt the state's ability to sell bonds to pay for projects.
"Even if the legislation was in place, the credit window is closed; the capital markets are locked up tight," said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Department of Finance.
On Wednesday, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer warned that a failure by Congress to adopt an economic recovery plan threatened the state's ability to sell bonds.
Those who live in the tiny community of Madison and other rural areas of Yolo County are moving forward as if the prison funding were not in question.
"We can't stop," said Madison resident Carla Phillips. "The funding could be there someday."
On Saturday, prison opponents, who have named their group "Save Rural Yolo County," plan to demonstrate their opposition to passing motorists at the busy intersection of Highway 16 and County Road 89. They also are waging a letter-writing campaign to state officials and planning a mass mailing to area residents. They say a rural area is no place to build a re-entry prison, which lawmakers urged should be built in urban areas, near inmates' families and social services.
Created last year by Assembly Bill 900, the re-entry prisons are intended to provide counseling and job training to inmates serving the last year of their sentences. The goal is to keep parolees from returning to prison.
The bill also allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to expand county jails.
Counties that agreed to site a re-entry prison, and came up with a workable location, got priority for the jail funding.
Yolo County received a provisional award of $30 million to expand its crowded Monroe Detention Center in Woodland after offering corrections officials the Madison site.
While AB 900 authorized the jail and prison funding, the office of Attorney General Jerry Brown said the bill's language needed to be fixed.
The fixes were contained in a bill attached to the state budget. During last-minute wrangling, Democrats and Republicans differed on other aspects of the bill, including a provision that affected good-time credits for state prisoners. The result was that the bill never came up for a vote.
Now, lawmakers and corrections officials have to decide what to do next. Possibilities include calling an emergency session of the Legislature or introducing a new measure when lawmakers return in January.
Another possibility is to persuade the attorney general to let the bonds be issued without clean-up legislation, said Seth Unger, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The department is going forward with the process of planning re-entry facilities, he said.
http://www.sacbee.com/101/v-print/story/1282578.html
Posted by lois at October 2, 2008 06:28 PM