Governor Jerry Brown's on the way out, but he still wants millions of dollars to help prisoners. He wants to spend $50 million to expand job training for prisoners and help them get a job once they get out.
His budget plan also includes $106 million for an incentive program already in place that rewards counties for reducing recidivism.
Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) told the SF Chronicle:
“The old way of locking people up and throwing away the key clearly hasn’t worked. It’s just led to a lot of costs but not a lot of results.
Of about 36,000 state inmates released in the most recent year for which data is available, 46% of them were convicted of crimes again within 3 years.
Assemblyman Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale) said:
“That’s a very miserable number. It indicates that the efforts, as currently constituted, are not being as successful as they need to be."
Lackey says he's okay with Brown's plan, but he wants also wants legislation to audit rehab programs to determine which ones work.
The prison population is going down in California, but that's only because of Jerry Brown's dangerous policies that have changed the definition of violent crimes and have emboldened repeat offenders.
Senator Jeff Stone (R-Temecula) has this to say about Brown's stance on crime:
“We are letting too many people out of jail and we aren’t putting enough people in jail or prison. We’re not holding people accountable for their crimes.”