SACRAMENTO — The program seemed a model of corrections reform in tight fiscal times: The mostly white-collar criminals who were enrolled saved taxpayers money by living in group homes instead of in state prison and held jobs that helped cover rent and restitution to victims.
Among the graduates of the state's two restitution centers, both in Los Angeles, is former Compton Mayor Omar Bradley, who provided job training for the disabled in Carson while serving time for using his city-issued credit card for personal expenses.
But on Thanksgiving Eve, state officials shut down the program and sent the 74 enrolled offenders to prisons, not even giving them time to tell their employers. Corrections department officials, ordered to cut their budget by $800 million this year, said California could no longer afford the program.
The decision perplexed prison-reform advocates, who called it a bureaucratic blunder born of government inefficiency.
"It's pretty stupid," said Robert Pratt, executive director of Volunteers of America's Los Angeles branch, which ran the two centers. "These are people who were working and paying for their upkeep and paying back victims. It is counterproductive to put them back in prison, where the taxpayer has to foot the whole bill."
The news came to the nonprofit Nov. 20 in a terse notice that the corrections department had "determined at this time that only contracts for services and functions of state government deemed critical and exempt will be utilized. Your contract is not exempt, therefore performance under contract . . . is hereby immediately suspended."
Scott Kernan, undersecretary for operations at the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, pointed out that the centers had about three dozen empty beds, and said the state could not afford to carry a program not operating at full capacity.
To be eligible, inmates had to owe restitution to their victims and have sentences of three years or less for nonviolent and nonsexual offenses. Kernan said the state could not find enough eligible volunteers to fill all 110 beds. Closing the centers will eliminate $500,000 in contract costs for the state this year, he said.
"Faced with the overall budget situation and the underutilization of those beds, I still think it was a good common-sense decision by the department," Kernan said.
