YOU SEE, TEXAS ISN'T ONLY STATE WITH PRISON PROBLEMS

New York's Eliot Spitzer, the tough ex-prosecutor turned governor,
wants a commission to examine closing some of his state's dozens of
prisons. Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is pressing for $11
billion in bonds to add 78,000 beds to California's already burgeoning
and overtaxed system.

What's going on here? Partly, it's what both men inherited. New York's
prison population peaked at 71,000 inmates in 1999 but has dropped by
8,000 since. Major explanations: dropping crime levels (especially in
New York City) and increased efforts to find alternative treatment for
nonviolent offenders.

California's prison population, meanwhile, has continued to surge.
It's now at 173,000 inmates, an $8 billion yearly bill. Overcrowding
and threats of riots are so serious that a senior prison official last
year warned of "an imminent and substantial threat to the public."

One ironic twist: Thirty years ago California's prison system was
hailed as America's best, providing education and psychotherapy for
offenders. New York, meanwhile, endured the tumultuous Attica prison
riot of 1971 and enacted Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's infamous drug laws
- -- widely copied in other states -- that swelled prison populations by
setting sentences up to life for possessing or selling even minuscule
amounts of narcotics.

So why the switch? In 1977, responding to a crime surge, California
Gov. Jerry Brown did away with the "indeterminate" sentencing that
gave both judges and parole boards flexibility in deciding when it was
safe to release an offender. Rehabilitation and treatment were largely
written out of the state prison code; punishment became the sole goal.
California's Legislature passed more than 1,000 mandatory
prison-sentence measures, topped by the 1994 enactment of the state's
famed "three strikes law" decreeing 25-year-to-life terms for most
two-time prior offenders.

New York in recent years has been trying reform. Indeed, as some of
the more ferociously severe drug-offense penalties were repealed in
2004, then-Gov. George Pataki could proclaim: "The Rockefeller drug
laws will be no more."

That's not to say that any reform is easy after decades of
"lock-em-up" politics and a "war" on drugs that's helped drive
America's incarceration rates to the highest in the world.

Plus, any governor faces formidable political obstacles trying to pare
back America's vast prison-industrial complex. In California, it's the
Correctional Peace Officers Association, an astounding 31,000 members
strong. Commanding a multimillion-dollar campaign war chest, the union
is a major factor in gubernatorial and legislative campaigns. The
three-strikes law is its full-employment act.

Former Gov. Gray Davis, whom Schwarzenegger ousted in the 2003 recall
election, appeased the union unabashedly. It has more than 2,000
members earning over $100,000 a year; its contract-guaranteed pension
benefits are today superior to those of the state university system.

On entering office, Schwarzenegger seemed intent on an independent
course, championing rehabilitation and appointing a reform prison
director. But when he began secret dealings with the union, his
director quit in protest. Schwarzenegger still talks of measures to
help prisoners straighten out their lives (mental-health counseling
and life-skills training, for example). But his latest budget cuts a
voter-mandated drug-treatment program that studies have shown to be
highly cost-effective. And his big emphasis now is on bricks and
mortar to confine more prisoners -- $11 billion for added state
prison, county jail and juvenile beds.

In New York, Spitzer also confronts a politically powerful prison
guard union, and more -- local politicians defending a network of
upstate prisons built in recent decades to help offset heavy
manufacturing job losses. An example: State Sen. Elizabeth Little,
whose Adirondacks district includes 12 prisons and prison camps.
"There are over 5,000 corrections officers living in my district," she
told The New York Times. "In most of these communities, the prisons
are the biggest employer."

Left unsaid in Little's frank assessment: a society in which
overwhelmingly white upstate New York communities rely economically on
massive incarceration of a heavily black and Hispanic prison population.

Will Spitzer, like Schwarzenegger, eventually retreat from his lofty
reform goals? New York state government cries out for systemic reform,
and his massive (69 percent) election mandate provides a
once-in-a-generation leadership opportunity. On ethics standards and
issues like prisons, he's showing a willingness to face down
legislators, even fellow Democrats.

It's a bold maneuver, all the more dramatic because Spitzer is
specifically including a critical look at today's vast prison
establishment and culture -- the issue most American politicos fear to
even discuss.

Eventually, Spitzer will be obliged to make some
compromises on legislation. Yet there's a parallel to
Theodore Roosevelt. As William Cunningham, a veteran of
two earlier New York administrations, told the Times:

"Roosevelt came in saying he was going to be a reform governor. He
immediately got into a fight with Senator Platt, the head of the
Republicans, a powerful political boss in the state. History remembers
Teddy Roosevelt. You have to be a knucklehead like me to remember Boss
Platt."

Peirce is a syndicated columnist who specializes in city and state
affairs. (nrp@citistates.com)