SCHWARZENEGGER DROPS PLAN FOR EARLY RELEASE OF 22,000 INMATES

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dumped his plan to release about
22,000 lower-risk inmates from prison before they complete their
terms, The Bee learned Monday.

The revised budget he will present on Wednesday will jettison the
plan, which would have freed prisoners doing time for crimes such as
drug possession and car theft who had less than 20 months to go on their terms.

The governor had sought the change as part of a 10 percent, across-
the-board general fund budget cut to deal with a multibillion-dollar deficit.

His plan was unlikely, however, to win support in upcoming budget
negotiations. Not a single legislator in the state had expressed
support for the idea.

Press secretary Aaron McLear confirmed that Schwarzenegger will drop
the early release plan but declined to comment further.

Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Jose Solorio, D-Santa Ana,
welcomed its demise.

"I'm sure the governor realized that up and down the state, no one
wants to see prisoners released early," Solorio said. "I was an early
advocate for dropping that plan, and I'm glad that he's realizing
people need to serve their time."

Critics of the state prison system had seen the early release
proposal as a possible opening to a wholesale overhaul of
California's approach to handling criminals.

Dan Macallair, the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and
Criminal Justice, expressed disappointment with the governor's
decision to back away from early release.

"The correctional crisis in California cannot be solved through the
normal political processes of Sacramento," Macallair said. "This is
just another example of that. Nobody has the courage to do the right thing."

California's prisons are jammed to about twice their designed
capacity. The overall prison population is a little more than 170,000.

In submitting the early release proposal in January, the governor's
budget writers said it could have saved the state nearly $1.2 billion
through the 2009-10 fiscal year.

On Monday, administration sources said the main factor in their
decision to withdraw the idea is that the inmate population has been
dropping on its own over the past year. They said the prison system
is now housing 2,107 fewer inmates every day in the current budget
year than the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
had anticipated. The sources asked for anonymity because the revised
budget has not yet been made public.

Fewer inmates coming in from the courts and fewer parolees returning
to prison for violating the technical conditions of their releases
from custody are accounting for the lower population numbers, the sources said.

Together, the result has been an estimated savings this year of $27.9
million, they said. Projections for next year indicate the potential
for another $78.2 million in savings.

Along with early release, the administration had sought to achieve
budget savings through what it called a "summary parole" plan.

Schwarzenegger intends to stick with that piece of his proposal.
Offenders who violate their parole conditions but don't commit new
crimes wouldn't be returned to prison under that plan. They would
still be subject to warrantless searches by local law enforcement.

While the governor is planning to withdraw the early release plan,
efforts to cap the prison population are still the subject of ongoing
litigation in the federal courts.

"There's more than one way to skin a cat," said Don Specter, director
of the nonprofit Prison Law Office in San Rafael. His firm is
representing inmates in cases where the state's provision of medical
and mental health care in the prisons has been found to be unconstitutional.