Cop-Out on Parole Reform

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, perhaps trying to show that he’s still a man of bipartisan consensus, held a news conference last week to celebrate the “fantastic” agreement he’d reached with legislators to transfer power from the adult Department of Corrections and the Youth Authority to a combined Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It will be headed by current Youth and Adult Correctional Secretary Roderick Q. Hickman.

The change, as state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) points out, guarantees nothing more than new business cards for Hickman and his staff. Meanwhile, without the fanfare, Schwarzenegger and Hickman are caving in to the powerful prison guards union by dismantling key corrections programs that save taxpayer money.

Hickman abruptly junked the core of the administration’s parole overhaul plan in an April 11 order. The reforms had put some parole violators in community-based drug treatment, subjected some to electronic monitoring or placed some in halfway houses instead of sending them back to prison.

Schwarzenegger actually began retreating from parole reform months before Hickman’s order, when he submitted a proposed budget that would cut $95 million from inmate and parolee rehabilitation programs. These cuts and the parole reversal eliminated tools -- such as bracelets that track parolees’ movements using global positioning satellites -- that are far cheaper than prison cells in dealing with nonviolent offenders. Currently, the state’s cost for such re-incarceration is $1 billion a year. Romero moved to restore most of the rehab funding last week, but in the Assembly, Rudy Bermudez (D-Norwalk), a member of the prison guards union, is pressing the governor to make even deeper cuts.

Hickman junked the parole programs just days after the conclusion of a $450,000 TV ad campaign largely funded by the guards union. It featured Nina Salarno-Ashford, whose sister was shot to death in 1979 by a killer she says “could be back on the street” because of the parole reforms. The claim is false. Schwarzenegger’s reforms could not have freed the killer because they applied only to nonviolent offenders. Yet the campaign was apparently enough to scare Schwarzenegger and his prison officials into scrapping not only their programs but their professed faith in alternative sanctions.

Parole reforms need more than a one-year commitment. They also require a governor and legislators willing to stand up to the prison guards, something few in recent years have had the backbone to do. Schwarzenegger can demonstrate that resolve in his May 15 budget by restoring the rehabilitation funding himself.