Prisons trump schools?

California has reached a milestone that clearly shows how misguided our priorities have become. In five years, based on current trends, California's prison budget will overtake spending on the state's universities.

I am not sure who wrote the opinion piece in the Daily Democrat, but they should spend a day walking a cell block in Folsom Prison. Then ask them how much they would have to be paid to do it every day. I would bet they wouldn't do it for any price.

Don't get me wrong, the Prison gaurd's union, the CCPOA, has way too much influence in the budget process, the sweetheart deal they made with Gray Davis was robery without a ski mask. However, the main reason there are guards who earn 100k a year at San Quentin is the shortage of prison guards to walk the floors and yard. California spent 277 million in overtime to correctional peace officers in 2004. Is that a lot of money? Yes it is. Is it a big piece of the state budget? Not even a blip, .002%

The Democrat's opinion goes on to state that CHP officers don't make as much as the 182 correctional offers at San Quentin that made over 100k. Really? The CHP also faces a shortage of officers and they are paying loads of overtime. Three Bay area CHP officers made over $80,000 in overtime alone in 2003. In 2004 the CHP paid over17 million dollars in overtime to officers sitting in their cars listening to the radio and doing paperwork at Caltrans construction sites. Those facts are easy to find, but why let facts get in the way of the Daily Democrat's opinion?

The biggest problem I have the is the way the opinion writer throws figures around as if they have meaning.

To reduce prison budgets, other states are canceling new prison construction; paroling people scheduled for parole a few weeks earlier at savings of millions of dollars;

Ooo, really, millions of dollars? Wow if you saved up a few thousand of those million dollars, you would have a billion dollars, that is about 1% of the California budget. Why do people point to a few million here and hundred million there are think they are going to make a dent in the way the state works?

Then we get to the real meat of the opinion, in my opinion at least.

eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses; providing treatment rather than prison for drug offenses.

No, instead California has taken and is taking the easy way out - we build more prisons and watch our education system struggle. Where have our priorities gone?

Ok, so you want to put thousands of felons back on the streets? That is your answer?

Let me tell you my partial solution. Let's build a real concrete and barbed wire fence from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. What effect would this have on the prison population? Glad you asked.

Why is it we never hear these social activists mention that 15% of California's inmates are illegal aliens? Why is it this percentage grows each year?

Lets build the wall, throw the minor felons back into Mexico and make it much, much harder for them to get back into to California to commit more crime. Even if that reduces the illegal criminal population by half that is a major step in getting the overcrowding problem solved.

Hey, but thats just my xenophobic, nativist, bigoted, small minded, hay seed, redneck opinion.