What has Arnold Done for Corrections?

Jennifer Steinhauer’s recent piece in the New York Times sees Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial tenure as a compromise in the spirit of independence and bipartisanism, which eventually ended up pleasing no one. Among other aspects of his tenure, Steinhauer mentions that “The most interesting — though least sexy —of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s political and policy machinations has been in prison reform.” She goes on to provide the following analysis:

When he was first elected, the governor vowed to fix the state’s prison system, which was overcrowded and expensive to run, and saddled with a health system so poor it was put under federal receivership. The governor promised to void the contracts of the powerful correction officers’ union, reduce costs and emphasize rehabilitation programs. After battling with public employee unions for his first two years in office, he accomplished little.

But toward the end of his term, over fierce opposition by the guards’ union and the threat of a veto override by Republicans and Democrats, he pushed through a large prison building plan and two changes that reduced overcrowding: moving juveniles out of prison into local facilities and pulling some nonviolent offenders out of the churn of the parole system.

“For the left, he was able to keep juveniles and nonviolent offenders out of prisons,” said Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford who chaired several panels on prisons, “and what went to the right was he never wavered on three strikes or releasing sex offenders or violent offenders.”

My sense is that analyzing correctional policy in right/left terms is inaccurate and unhelpful. While the topic is undoubtedly a political one, and we do often see a party split in state votes on correctional policy, the concern about public safety, the fear of crime, and the punitive recourse, tend to transcend party lines. As many of my colleagues often say: No politician, on the right OR on the left, wants to be seen as “soft on crime.”

In this light, i think a better analysis of Schwarzenegger’s dealings with the correctional apparatus should have included his interesting response to the Plata/Coleman panel population reduction order. On one hand, the Governor immediately sprang to action defending CDCR and its machinations. The State has vigorously opposed the order just as it opposed the initiatives of the Receiver, continuously attempting to thwart his efforts and remove him from office. On the other hand, in the heels of the Plata/Coleman decision, Schwarzenegger himself proposed a population reduction plan that was less ambitious but pursued some similar reduction mechanisms: Good work credits, a reduction in parole, and increased use of GPS monitoring.

A Macchiavellistic analysis of this move could be that, given the existence of a gubernatorial reduction plan, the Supreme Court (which is now hearing Plata/Coleman on the merits) might be accepting the state’s appeal, noting that the state makes efforts to decarcerate on its own, without need of federal interference. But I tend to think the answer is simpler: Schwarzenegger hopped on the decarceration wagon not because of shrewd political considerations or a commitment to bipartisanship, but because there is no other choice. The budget slice allotted to corrections was simply too big to be sustainable. Public opinion slowly drifted away from punitivism once it became clear that our correctional policies directly impacted our wallets. The center could not–and still cannot–hold, and Schwarzenegger understood that as a practical, not a political, matter. His out-of-the-box ideas, such as housing inmates in Mexico, were an attempt to resolve a pressing problem that stood–and stand–in the way of balancing our state’s checkbook.

The correctional crisis was not Schwarzenegger’s doing, and his awakening came way too late in his gubernatorial career. Our options for this office are not exciting; we’ve looked at both Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman‘s respective correctional policies. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide which is the lesser evil.

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Props to Simon Grivet for the NYT link.

Would Legalizing Marijuana Increase Revenue?

This morning’s Chron includes a story about a recently-completed RAND study on the expected fiscal effects of legalizing marijuana.

The upshot of the six-month study by the nonpartisan Rand Drug Policy Research Center is this: It’s anybody’s guess as to whether the state will suffer or prosper if voters approve Proposition 19 on the November ballot. The measure would allow local governments to regulate and tax pot sales and controlled cultivation, and to let adults over 21 possess as much as an ounce.

“There is just so much uncertainty, that while we could look at the data and create a scenario that could be very good from an economic standpoint, we could also create a very bad one,” said Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, co-director of the Rand center in Santa Monica. “The overall effect is a bit of a mystery.”

More information, directly from RAND:

While the state Board of Equalization has estimated taxing legal marijuana could raise more than $1 billion in revenue, the RAND study cautions that any potential revenue could be dramatically higher or lower based on a number of factors, including the level of taxation, the amount of tax evasion and the response by the federal government.

Past research provides solid evidence that marijuana consumption goes up when prices go down, but the magnitude of the consumption increase cannot be predicted because prices will fall to levels below those ever studied, researchers say. Consumption also might rise because of non-price effects such as advertising or a reduction in stigma, researchers say.

In addition to uncertainty about the taxes levied and evaded, researchers do not know how users will respond to such a large drop in price. Even under a scenario with high taxes ($50 per ounce) and a moderate rate of tax evasion (25 percent), researchers cannot rule out consumption increases of 50 percent to 100 percent, and possibly even larger. If prevalence increased by 100 percent, marijuana use in California would be close to the prevalence levels recorded in the late 1970s.

The full RAND report, which can be downloaded here, reaches the following conclusions:

  • The pretax retail price of marijuana will substantially decline, likely by more than 80 percent. The price that consumers face will depend heavily on taxes, the structure of the regulatory regime, and how taxes and regulations are enforced.
  • Consumption will increase, but it is unclear how much because we know neither the shape of the demand curve nor the level of tax evasion (which reduces revenues and the prices that consumers face).
  • Tax revenues could be dramatically lower or higher than the $1.4 billion estimate; for example, there is uncertainty about potential tax revenues that California might derive from taxing marijuana used by residents of other states (e.g., from “drug tourism”).
  • Previous studies find that the annual costs of enforcing marijuana laws range from around $200 million to nearly $1.9 billion; our estimates show that the costs are probably less than $300 million.
  • There is considerable uncertainty about the impact of legalizing marijuana in California on public budgets and consumption, with even minor changes in assumptions leading to major differences in outcomes.
  • Much of the research used to inform this debate is based on insights from studies that examine small changes in either marijuana prices or the risk of being sanctioned for possession. The proposed legislation in California would create a large change in policy. As a result, it is uncertain how useful these studies are for making projections about marijuana legalization.

The predictive model adopted by the paper considers a possible scenario: a $50 per-ounce tax (they do consider some alternative scenarios and intervening factors). The researchers find that, in this situation, marijuana consumption is elastic and might increase. This prediction is based on levels of usage in the past. Part of the challenge, as researchers admit, is that predicting changes in consumption is a difficult thing to do; it is difficult to tell how much of the usage level has to do with changes in price or regulatory regime (and, of course, whether changes in usage are going to be short-term or long-term.)

This is an interesting development. Before formulating the proposal, Tom Ammiano’s office had done some public polling, which suggested that the public was much more likely to support a legalization bill if it were marketed as a revenue enhancing measure (“tax and regulate” rather than “legalize”). This plan, however, might backfire in light of the results of the RAND report. However, it is important to keep in mind, when considering whether to vote for this proposition, whether there are not other reasons for legalization.

Changing Discourses in Anti-Death Penalty Advocacy

Several people at the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty meeting asked me to post my plenary panel remarks online; I hope you find them interesting.

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Good morning everyone,

This gathering is a historical event, an attempt to place this country, whose pride and shame so often lie in its exceptionalism and uniqueness, in a global context, as part of a global movement. I looked at the program and it promises to be a fascinating day of examining world trends and exploring the ways in which the United States, an industrialized democracy whose execution statistics dwarf those of many developing nations, might fit into a paradigm of nation-wide abolition. Before we embark upon this important journey, though, I thought I would offer a few comments that might touch on this U.S. exceptionalism. More accurately, I would like to discuss the strategies and arguments that death penalty abolitionists, academics and activists, have used over the last decades, and situate them in the unique context of U.S. bipartisan politics, the legal profession, and the centrality of race in U.S. criminal justice policy.

Anti-death penalty discourse around the world often appeals to notions of humanitarianism, human rights, and morality. This family of arguments, which dates back centuries to rationales offered by Cesare Beccaria in his 17th century book Delle Crimen y Delle Penne, has always been part of the abolitionist agenda in the United States. However, over the years, American discourse has also included three non-humanitarian arguments, which have taken a place of prominence in public discourse here about the death penalty. I would like to present the three of them and talk about the unique U.S. conditions that produced them as part of the discourse. The three arguments are:

1) The lack of deterrent effect of executions;
2) the rate of wrongful convictions among those sentenced to death;
3) and the cost of administering the death penalty.

I presented the arguments in a rough chronological fashion. If you look today at activist websites about the death penalty, you are likely to find all three of these arguments represented, but each of them occupied center stage in public discourse for a while, later giving way to a new non-humanitarian argument.

Our love affair with deterrence arguments came in the heels of the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty after a four-year moratorium. This is well known, of course, to many people interested in the death penalty. What is somewhat less known is the role that an empirical study by Isaac Ehrlich, published shortly before the decision in Gregg, played in bringing this development about. Ehrlich used econometric calculations to show that each execution prevented eight murders. His study was extensively cited by the Supreme Court as an argument for the death penalty. Ehrlich’s study was not an outlier and its timing was not a coincidence. Its seeds were sown in the late 1960s, when the rise in crime rates, and fear of crime, were central features of the Nixon campaign. During this era, crime control and law enforcement became a regular feature of the U.S. political game, and particularly of the right/left divide. This played out in important ways during the 1970s, when a meta-research conducted by Robert Martinson found that rehabilitative programs in prison did not reduce recidivism. The general disillusionment with rehabilitation—until then a feature, at least in terms of rhetoric, of the U.S. sentencing and correctional system – pushed policymakers back to the traditional paradigm of aims of punishment, seeking retribution and deterrence. This was aided by the rise of punitive, fear-driven discourse, particularly in connection with the nascent war on drugs of the 1980s. Under such conditions, it was unavoidable that anti-death penalty discourse would address this issue. Critique of Ehrlich’s model emerged almost immediately. His methodology was heavily criticized. And several permutations of the deterrence arguments persist to this day. Last year I went to the Empirical Legal Studies conference, and, indeed, two teams of researchers were still battling minute econometrical details, trying to prove or discredit the deterrent effect of the death penalty. The methodological aspects of the debate would be lost on the general public, and the political motivation behind the argument was rather obscured; ironically, the better people got at producing models that predicted or disproved deterrent effects of the death penalty, the less interesting their work got in terms of its public appeal. In other words, the debate about deterrent effect has lost some of its steam and has been relegated to the realm of specialized, sophisticated scholars.

A new argument, however, emerged on the horizon. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, anti-death penalty discourse was fuelled by arguments pertaining to mistakes in convictionsk, made particularly tragic in the context of the death penalty because of its irreversibility. Several developments made the wrongful conviction and exoneration argument possible and important at the time. First, proving innocence seemed to be a dream finally attained through the introduction of DNA as an inexpensive, realistic option for the broad population of criminal defendants. It is important to point out that, despite the mystique of DNA, most exonerations of wrongfully convicted inmates did not occur through DNA testing, but rather through discrediting eyewitness identification. The early and mid-1990s were good years for the field of criminal psychology, yielding “white paper” about the unreliability of lineups and eyewitness identification, as well as a discredit of testimony by hypnosis. The success of U.S. television programs based on criminal forensics and science, particularly the CSI franchise that started showing in 2000, reflect the great hope awarded in the public imagination to science and the body as a means for uncovering the truth. The potential of scientific techniques in correcting wrongful convictions was harnessed by another important development: The emergence of clinical education in law schools, and particularly the emergence of innocence projects, in which students pursued, pro bono, wrongful conviction claims on behalf of inmates. The first Innocence Project was founded in 1992 in Cardozo School of Law under the leadership of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, and offered, perhaps for the first time, the promise of scientific arguments to support abolition. There is one more important factor to keep in mind as we consider the emergence of exoneration and wrongful conviction arguments as anti-death penalty discourse: the growing public acknowledgment of the part played by race in the criminal justice system in general and on death row in particular. As our attention to wrongful convictions grew, we became more aware of the particular ways in which racial minorities in the U.S. were particularly vulnerable to intrusive police techniques, identification mishaps, racist jury panels, and vindictive judges, particularly in certain regions of the country. Not only were most people on death row members of racial minority groups, the stories of exonerees revealed how their racial identity impacted the prognosis of their criminal cases.

The exoneration argument was, however, not without its flaws and weaknesses. First, contrary to the grand promise of science and its appeal to the public (now known in the U.S. as the CSI Effect), DNA methods lost some of their iron-clad hold in court, if not on the general public. Wrongful conviction scholars find it increasingly difficult to gauge the exact number of wrongfully convicted people in prison in general, and on death row in particular. Do we count cases in which multiple eye-witnesses have recanted? Do we count cases in which police interrogation was abusive and coercive, even if we do not know whether it yielded the truth? While the public perhaps continued to perceive science and forensics as good ways to weed out the innocent, a growing discourse of fear and punitivism took hold. This seemingly contradictory trends are easy to explain when one considers that punitiveness gains legitimacy if it is guaranteed that those suffering from it are the guilty. Add to this the enlistment of the nascent victim advocacy movements to support the agenda of punitive politics (which I know many brave people in this audience, who have been victimized by crime, actively resist) and you’ll get a perfect punitive storm, pushing various reforms such as the Three Strikes Law. While the death penalty is unique, it should be seen in the context of this discourse of fear. Under such conditions, politicians of all stripes were concerned, and still are, about not appearing “soft on crime”, and in many regions of the U.S., opposing the death penalty is unthinkable for symbolic reasons as well as for reasons of realpolitik.

This challenge, of not appearing “soft on crime” while rejecting punitivism in general and the death penalty in particular, may have been addressed by the third non-humanitarian anti-death penalty discourse: The issue of cost and expense. With the recent financial crisis, the expenses associated with punitive sentencing regimes and mass incarceration have revealed to the public what was previously an invisible, underground “city” of corrections. The public is much more aware of incarceration conditions in general and conditions on death row in particular. Proposals to expand the San Quentin death row made headlines in California newspapers. And media discussions have led to a rising profile of the typically lengthy death row litigation. It should be mentioned, ironically, that as the costs of lengthy appeals and habeas corpus writs become a subject of public concern, the actual legal opportunities for post-conviction remedies grow narrow. Habeas corpus litigation in the U.S. has been gradually curbed, and overworked courts are more reluctant every day to hear death row appeals. Nevertheless, the argument seems to be that the death penalty, as it is administered today in the U.S., is no more than life imprisonment under difficult, expensive conditions, and accompanied by incessant litigation. This is a premise that budget-conscious politicians, whether conservative or progressive, can get behind with less risk to their public image.

Why do U.S activists use these arguments? Primarily, because they work. They are uniquely tailored to the realities of a bipartisan political system, in which, for various historical reasons, the death penalty has come to be a political issue. This is often difficult to understand for those unfamiliar with the U.S. context. After all, in Western democracies that abolished the death penalty the political divide is no longer an issue. And of course, once the death penalty has been abolished it is much more difficult to reinstate than it is to keep in place where it still exists. In non-democratic countries that still have the death penalty, the need to persuade the government to abolish it is irrelevant. The unique position of the U.S. as a punitive democracy is what necessitates this family of utilitarian arguments. If the human rights argument has been disabled due to fear and rhetoric, the public is spoken to through the lowest common ground: its wallet.

The proof is in the pudding. Recently, New Mexico abolished the death penalty, prominently citing issues of costs. Numerous U.S. states have placed moratoria on executions for the same reasons. Support for abolition, as well as for other nonpunitive measures such as drug legalization, skyrockets when they are presented as revenue-enhancing measures. California periodicals are peppered with editorial pieces by conservative politicians arguing that the costs of lengthy litigation and safe confinement are too much to spend if executions continue being administered at the current rate, thus supporting a cheaper solution: life without parole. The cost argument, therefore, holds the promise of persuasion.

The costs of using the cost argument, however, are a little less tangible. Everytime an argument against the death penalty is based solely on issues of cost, non-deterrence, and possible mistake, anti-death penalty activists accept their adversary’s rules of engagement and play their game on their terms. And while cost arguments are not fake or misleading – the costs are true – there is something misleading about presenting them at the forefront of what used to be, and should always be, a concern for our fellow human beings, be they offenders, victims, or correctional personnel. As a movement, we need to make a decision whether, and to what extent, we are willing to play this game to obtain the desired outcome, and what is the combination of strategy and ideological conviction that we can live with best. Thank you.

Sit/Lie Ordinance Will Be on Ballot

My moral standing is lying down.
—Nine Inch Nails, “The Only Time”

Today’s Chron reports Mayor Newsom’s intention to bypass the Board of Supervisors and take the Sit/Lie Ordinance to the voters on the 2010 ballot. We have discussed this ordinance here and there, but now that the decisionmaking has been shifted unto the voters, it is time to talk a little bit about the details.

If San Francisco voters are presented with a sit/lie ordinance in 2010, there are a few parameters that are worth considering:

Are there alternatives? If the San Francisco police can arrest or cite offenders for loitering, aggressive panhandling, assault, and drug offenses, what is the marginal benefit of this ordinance?

Time/space limitations? An ordinance of this sort is more likely to conform to constitutional standards if it doesn’t pursue and persecute people whenever and wherever they are. Similar pieces of legislation elsewhere have limited the criminal prohibition to certain hours in the day and certain areas of the city.

Warning? The law is significantly less draconian if it gives people the opportunity to move away. In some municipalities, a warning needs to be given in writing; in others, an oral warning will suffice.

Authorization to arrest? Does violating the law trigger the risk of arrest? If so, voters might be interested in weighing the interest of proportonality.

Sentencing? This goes to the question how comfortable we are with people doing time in jail–overcrowded as it is–for a municipal petty offense. It is rather likely that, in light of jail overcrowding, most of these cases will be dismissed anyway or dealt with through a fine system, in which case the efficacy and deterrence of the new law should be assessed. And if there is a fine, how much should it be, and how will its amount be tailored to the likely offenders?

Alternative shelter and related expenses? Sit/Lie Ordinances in other municipalities have been found unconstitutional by the 9th Circuit when the court found that the folks lying in the street had nowhere else to go. Providing enough shelter, so as to assure the new law’s constitutionality, may cause the city to incur additional preparation and expense.

And, finally–impact on budget? Beyond the issue of shelter, voters need to take into account the impact that citations, arrests, and sentencing will have on the city budget. The more severe the implications of ordinance violation are, the more expensive this measure will be. Even if massive case dismissals will thwart the effort (which may very well be the case), it will still eat up valuable prosecutorial time and money.

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Props to KCBS, with whom I talked about this topic this afternoon, for prompting the discussion, and to Adam Maldonado for some very useful information.

Impact of Strikers’ Health Care on Prison Budget

Marisa Lagos’s story this morning on the Chron discusses the impact of old and infirm inmates on prison budget. The piece references a report by State Auditor Elaine Howle (which you can access here in full). Her key findings are as follows:

43,500 inmates currently sentenced under the three strikes law (striker inmates) make up 25 percent of the total inmate population. Further, with regards to striker inmates:

  • On average, they receive sentences that are nine years longer—resulting in approximately $19.2 billion in additional costs.
  • More than half are currently imprisoned for convictions that are not classified as strikes.
  • Many were convicted of committing multiple serious or violent offenses on the same day, while some committed one or more of these offenses as a juvenile.
Health Care Services has not fully estimated potential savings from its proposed cost containment strategies. Further, a significant portion of the cost of housing inmates is for providing health care, which includes contracted specialty health care.
  • Roughly 41,000 of the 58,700 inmates that incurred specialty health care costs averaged just more than $1,000 per inmate and cost $42 million in total. The remaining 17,700 inmates incurred costs of more than $427 million in the same year.
  • Specialty health care costs averaged $42,000 per inmate for those inmates that incurred more than $5,000 for such costs and were age 60 and older.
  • The specialty health care costs associated with inmates that died during the last quarter of the fiscal year were significantly greater than any specific age group—ranging from $150 for one inmate to more than $1 million for another.
Nearly 32 percent of overtime costs in fiscal year 2007–08, or $136 million, were related to medical guarding and transportation for health care.

Custody staff’s growing leave balances—due in part to vacancies, errors in Corrections’ staffing formula, and exacerbated by the State’s furlough program—represent a future liability to the State of at least $546 million and could be more than $1 billion.
We discussed this issue before. While Strikers and infirm prisoners are not the majority of prison population, their impact on the budget is enormous.

Close the CA Division of Juvenile Justice

Daniel Macallair has made an outstanding argument in the LA Times for closing the Division of Juvenile Justice and its five state-run youth correctional facilities. “The system is broken everywhere you look.” Allowing counties, instead of the state, to house juvenile offenders (currently about 1,400 of them) would save the state government $322.7 million (yes, a third of a billion dollars). County probation systems already handle 99% of juvenile cases.

Prison Spending and the CA Budget Crisis: Panel at the Goldman School of Public Policy

I’ve just heard of a fascinating event. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it, but I hope many of you will:

WHAT CAN YOU GET FOR $10 BILLION?

Prison Spending and the CA Budget Crisis

An expert panel discussion on what prison spending and criminal justice policy mean for CA’s budget crisis and other spending priorities.

April 15, 2010
5:30-7:30pm
Goldman School of Public Policy
2607 Hearst Ave (Room 250)
Berkeley, CA

Moderated by Henry E. Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy.

CONFIRMED PANELISTS:
Jeanne Woodford, Retired Chief of Adult Probation, City and County of San Francisco, Former Undersecretary and Director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Former Warden of San Quentin State Prison
Dave Lewis, Deputy Director Fiscal Services, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Lance Corcoran, Chief Spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association
John Dannenberg, Former CA Prisoner and Contributing Writer, Prison Legal News
Paul Golaszewski Lead Analyst on Adult Corrections, Legislative Analyst’s Office
Aaron Edwards Lead Analyst on Correctional Health Care and Inmate Rehabilitation Programs, Legislative Analyst’s Office

Light refreshments will be served.

Receiver Advocates Medical Parole

Clark Kelso encourages voters to endorse medical parole for chronically ill inmates as a measure for significantly reducing expenditures on the prison health system. This morning’s Sac Bee reports:

“I am keenly aware, as are the courts,” Kelso said, “that a dollar that we can save in the prison health care program is a dollar that can be spent on other important priorities for the state, such as education, money for children, the elderly, other health care programs.”

An aide in Kelso’s office said that, conservatively, the prison system could save $213 million over five years by paroling just 32 inmates identified as severely incapacitated.

Twenty-one of those 32 inmates are in nursing facilities or hospitals outside prisons, which requires spending for expensive guard time – including overtime – as well as huge health care costs.

These 21 inmates’ average annual health care and guard costs total more than $1.97 million apiece – a total of $41.4 million a year for 21 individuals, said Kelso aide Luis Patiño.

The bill was introduced by Mark Leno. Interestingly, the bill would do something else that reverses a 40-year trend: it would give parole boards some of their power and discretion back. Medical releases would depend on a parole board determination that the inmate no longer poses a danger to society due to his or her medical condition.

As I told my students last week, one of the most significant implications of the shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing was a shift in power within the system. The most noticeable effect of this change was the transfer of power from judges to prosecutors and legislators; determinate sentencing “locked” the defendants into a sentence based on the charge, and therefore awarded prosecutors a powerful bargaining chip in deciding which offense to charge. However, these changes were accompanied by “truth in sentencing” laws, requiring that inmates serve the majority of their sentence, stripping the parole board from its previously immense power to assess rehabilitation and risk.

It seems that the new proposal would reinfuse parole boards with some of that discretion, but keep it within reasonable boundaries. The concern about disparities and inconsistent criteria for release is significantly narrowed when the parole board has to hear evidence from doctors about the extent to which a certain inmate might be incapacitated due to his or her illness. This seems to be a not-unreasonable assessment, especially since much of the argument against early releases has to do with the concern about putting violent, dangerous people back on the streets. If someone’s illness renders him or her non-dangerous, the only argument remaining for keeping them behind bars is retribution. And the question is whether we can afford pure retribution, as things stand today.

Humonetarianism in Cuts: Voters Concede to Prison and Park Cuts


Today’s Chron reported about a field poll conducted in CA in early March. Respondents were required to suggest areas suitable for spending cuts. Almost no public service was mentioned, which is not surprising (and is the reason why policymakers are better than the public in thinking budget issues through!), the public did mention only two areas in which the state should cut spending:

The survey found 56 percent of voters polled support cuts to state prisons and correctional facilities, and 52 percent support cuts to state parks and recreational facilities. Also, 48 percent support cuts to environmental regulations, and 48 percent would cut public transit.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal for next year actually satisfies the top preferences of those surveyed. He has proposed an $811 million cut in prison health care spending and the elimination of spending on parks. He suggests replacing the $140 million to parks with money generated by a lease for oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Still, if those two cuts are enacted, they would amount to less than 5 percent of the overall budget shortfall.

The question is, of course, what aspect of prison spending the public would be comfortable with. Would it include rehabilitation and reentry programs? Would the public approve of the suggested health care cuts? How would the public feel if no new prisons were built? Or, does this support extend to decriminalization, early releases, and parole reform, for saving purposes? Some research we discussed elsewhere suggests that budgetary concerns would lead the public to support such reform, but this poll, apparently, was concerned with the entire budget and therefore did not go into detail.