SACRAMENTO — After an impassioned debate over the cost and benefit of California's massive prison system, the state Senate on Thursday narrowly approved a controversial bill to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on state lockups by reducing the time lower-level inmates would spend behind bars and on parole.
But the proposal remained stalled in the Assembly, where a host of lawmakers vying for higher office refused to take a vote that could portray them as soft on crime, and Speaker Karen Bass kept her members late into the night in an effort to push through a watered-down version.
The discord came as the state faces a looming deadline from three federal judges to produce a plan to reduce overcrowding by taking about 40,000 inmates out of a system that now holds nearly 170,000.
Democratic leaders and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been pushing a proposal that could help satisfy the judges and save money to shore up California's shaky budget.
They would cut the prison population by 37,000 by the middle of 2011 with measures that would shift resources toward higher-risk inmates and parolees. They would reduce the time lower-level offenders and those who show evidence of rehabilitation would serve behind bars and scale back their parole supervision. Officials hope that would cut down on the 70% rate at which California inmates return to prison, one of the highest in the nation.
Republicans and some law enforcement groups, who characterize the plan as "early release" and "get out of jail free," warned that it would reverse the significant drops in crime of recent years.
"We will see mayhem on the streets of California," Sen. Jeff Denham (R-Atwater) told colleagues on the Senate floor Thursday.
The legislation was needed to implement nearly half of the $1.2 billion in cuts that the governor and legislative leaders included in last month's budget deal without specifying how they would be made. Administration officials say they can make the rest of the reductions by cutting administrative expenses and transferring illegal immigrant prisoners to federal custody.
In a long and contentious Senate session, the prisons plan was described as historic by both advocates and opponents. Democrats said it represented a long-needed change to a relentlessly punitive criminal justice system that has spun out of control, to the point that the state pays more for incarceration than for higher education. They chastised Republicans for fear-mongering.
