<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n Way back in 2006 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said that his state's long troubled prison system\u2014the largest, most overcrowded in the country\u2014was in a state of crisis. So Arnold came up with a plan: More beds. Expanded facilities. A few months of job training and addiction counseling prior to release. It was cheap, easy and ineffective.\n\nFast-forward to 2009 when a panel of federal judges ruled that California's prisons were unconstitutional\u2014in fact the state's 33 prisons were in such hellish condition that 43,000 inmates, or nearly a third of its prison population, had to go. Like, now. The governor fought the decision, saying no stinkin' judge could intervene if California wanted to punish its prisoners in cruel and unusual ways. (Ironically, the judges cited the governor's own demands for reform as evidence of how screwed up the state's prisons are.) The US Supreme Court rejected the governor's claim in January.\n\nIn the meantime, the state came up with a plan to get 6,500 inmates out of its prisons over the next year through a combo of early release programs and changes to parole rules. This is broke-ass California, however, where counties are hemorrhaging jobs and desperate lawmakers are considering all manner of policy changes to close the dreaded budget gap: State parks have been shuttered, marijuana legalization is a very real possibility, and privatization could be the next step in prison reform. So it wasn't long before things got weird with the new prison plan.\n\nThough officials had planned a cautious approach to early releases, overburdened counties began letting inmates loose almost immediately. In Sacramento, this led to a man's release on a Monday and his rearrest the following day for an alleged rape attempt. That, in turn, led to a lawsuit from a local police union\u2014which argued that early releases were a safety hazard. A subsequent ruling from a superior court judge halted the releases. Other police unions around the state followed suit. Then, because the process apparently hadn't been garbled enough, the Sacramento judge changed his mind.\n\nMeanwhile there's no doubt that an early release plan would yield a huge savings for the state. California's corrections and rehab secretary, Matthew Cate, told the New York Times that the plan was \"overdue and necessary\"\u2014that it could save the state $100 million this year. With California facing a projected $20 billion deficit\u2014and thousands of prisoners still living in debased conditions\u2014the state may have no other choice.\u2014Tim Stelloh"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/your-california-prison-crisis-primer>