SO FAR, PRISONS MANAGE TO DUCK BUDGET AX

When Gov. Gray Davis proposed midyear budget cuts last week, few programs
were spared. Adult Medi-Cal recipients would have to do without dental
care. Disabled people were asked to forgo a cost-of-living increase in
monthly grants. People who recently escaped welfare would lose their
guarantee of subsidized child care. Scores of road projects could be delayed.

But one part of the budget -- prisons -- escaped largely unscathed. The
Department of Corrections, which runs the prisons, spends more than 6
percent of the state's general fund. Yet it accounted for only 0.1 percent
of the $10.2 billion in cuts and other money-saving measures proposed by Davis.

Davis said he would not balance the budget by jeopardizing public safety.

But advocates for health care, schools and other threatened services ask
why prisons seem to lead a charmed life.

"The idea that you're going to cut 400,000 to 500,000 people from getting
health insurance and not even examine corrections ... is a little
unconscionable," said Iris Lav, deputy director of the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C.

"I thought there were no sacred cows," Shawn Weymouth of Gilroy wrote in an
e-mail to The Bee after noticing the dearth of prison reductions among
Davis' midyear cuts.

Weymouth, who has worked for 20 years in education and social services,
said the Department of Corrections "is sucking us dry and creating more
problems with crime than it fixes."

Halting prison expansions and releasing older, nonviolent offenders "could
save millions of dollars in the next year," he said.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco, said in response to
Davis' budget-cutting proposal that prisons "will not be spared." Maybe
parolees who fail a drug test shouldn't automatically be sent back to
prison, he said. Or perhaps prisoners over the age of 70 -- "unless they're
Charlie Manson" -- should be sent home with electronic monitoring devices.

As California and other states enter an era of shrinking budgets, they are
grappling with how to rein in one of their fastest-growing costs. Prison
budgets ballooned in the prosperous 1990s, a time when states embraced
tougher sentencing laws. Now that the economic boom is over, they are being
forced to ask whether keeping felons behind bars trumps the needs of
schools, health care for the poor or highways.

"Almost a million people were added to prisons and jails in the 1990s. It
almost doubled," said Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy
Institute, a Washington think tank that advocates less reliance on
incarceration. "Everyone was lavishing money on prisons. It made them look
good politically to be tough on crime. Now they're paying the price."

Some states have taken steps to trim corrections costs. Ohio, Illinois and
Wyoming have shuttered old, inefficient prisons.

Colorado was close to finishing a new women's prison but decided to delay
its opening because of budget constraints, said Arturo Perez of the
National Conference of State Legislatures.

This year, 17 states slashed prison budgets, he said, more than cut
Medicaid, K-12 education or welfare-to-work programs.

California, in the budget signed by Davis in September, was among those
that curtailed prison spending. But the drop of 1.7 percent was far smaller
than the hits absorbed by some other programs. Health care, for instance,
fell 4.8 percent -- a total of $653 million.

When it comes to prisons, the state faces a unique set of circumstances. It
has passed some of the toughest repeat offender statutes in the nation,
foremost among them the "three-strikes-and-you're-out" law. Although
California's incarceration rate is close to the national average, in the
1990s it shot up from 321 inmates per 100,000 people to 464.

One of Davis' defining characteristics has been his ironclad refusal to go
easier on criminals.

And the union representing correctional officers wields substantial
political influence. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association
topped special interests in campaign contributions from 1995 to 2000,
according to a Common Cause report this year.

"The power of the prison guard union in California is unparalleled,"
Schiraldi said.

In the meantime, the Department of Corrections says that the Legislature
for years has failed to cover the true cost of keeping more than 150,000
prisoners behind bars in 33 prisons. Those costs include prison guard
overtime, workers' compensation claims, medical care and utilities.

Courts have ruled that the prison system must provide a full range of
medical treatment to prisoners. When the state refused to approve a kidney
transplant in 1997, for instance, the inmate sued and won. The court fined
the state $35,000 for delaying the procedure.

The department has suffered from a chronic shortage of correctional
officers, contributing to huge overtime costs and a rise in sick leave use
and workers' compensation claims, according to a number of state reports
and audits.

Despite a short-lived decline in prison populations, the department says it
doesn't have enough room for maximum-security inmates. So even as the state
faces a shortfall approaching $30 billion, it's forging ahead with a plan
to build a new maximum-security prison in Delano.

When it comes to cutting costs, "there's not the kind of flexibility other
departments have because we are a 24-hour operation seven days a week,"
said Stephen Green, a spokesman for the Youth and Adult Correctional
Agency, which oversees the department. "We're not in a position where we
can stop manning prisons."

Green said the department has already taken cost-cutting steps, such as
closing sections of prisons.

The budget proposal presented by Davis on Jan. 10 will likely include
deeper cuts, he said, including the closing of three prisons in the
California Youth Authority system.

"There are many whole programs we expect to see dropped," Green said.

Spending less on such programs as drug treatment and vocational training
likely will drive up the recidivism rate, which has fallen in the past four
years, Green said.

Besides, cutting programs in the prisons doesn't offer much potential for
savings compared to shrinking the prison population, budget analysts say.

During this year's budget talks, nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth
Hill floated several ideas that together would have saved as much as $500
million. One option was to exempt nonviolent offenders from parole, as long
as they hadn't been convicted of selling drugs. Another would have released
nonviolent inmates up to 12 months early.

The Legislature rejected them with little discussion, a testament to the
political sensitivity of the issue.

"If you get one person out of prison and they commit a crime, someone's
afraid their political career will be ended," Lav said.

At the same time, a Field Poll a year ago found that 34 percent of
Californians would support cuts in prison spending -- a higher portion than
would slash parks, highway construction, public assistance to low-income
children, education, public health or police. The only more popular target
for cuts -- by one percentage point -- was the state's electricity contracts.

"These recommendations can be enacted and public safety can be maintained,"
Schiraldi said. "They'd at least ameliorate the kinds of cuts that are
going to be foisted on health and welfare and education."