Gov. Jerry Brown may not want to discuss his legacy just yet, but he is a visionary on criminal justice reform as he used his State of the State speech this week to underscore. He is the first California governor to realize the self-defeating folly of governments routinely ruining the salvageable lives of so many people by locking them up for so long.
Brown noted that the state incarcerates nearly three times as many people per capita now than it did in 1970 — while spending nearly three times as much of its budget on prisons. Then he got to the point: Californians need to “take time to understand how our system of crime and punishment has evolved, how other states and countries have devised their prison systems and what changes might we now make. I urge that instead of enacting new laws because of horrible crimes and lurid headlines, you consider the overall system and what it might need and what truly protects public safety.”
So what’s needed? For starters, more mental health and drug treatment programs and better training and education. “Those we are getting, but more is needed, particularly hope,” Brown said. “When a human being gets a 20- or 40-year sentence, as tens of thousands do, incentives to reform weaken ... . That is why recent measures are so vital which allow the possibility of earlier parole and milestone credits for those who turn their lives around.”
The last sentence refers to Proposition 57, a 2016 measure that Brown championed. The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board opposed it over flaws in its drafting but hailed its rationale: the understanding that crime is generally a young man’s game, and that it is absurd to warehouse tens of thousands of prisoners into their 40s and 50s at extreme cost to taxpayers. An FBI study of 1990s crime data found 18-year-old males were nearly 10 times as likely to be arrested as men aged 45-49.
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