CALIFORNIA CONSIDERS RELEASING PRISONERS TO CUT BUDGETS

California Governor Gray Davis Is Fine-tuning A New Budget Proposal That
Could Raise Taxes For Some And Slash Some Public Service Programs For Others.

SACRAMENTO (AP) -- Proposals to release some nonviolent and elderly
prisoners early have emerged in California and other states confronting
massive budget shortfalls.

Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton enraged prosecutors by recently allowing hundreds
of low-level felons to leave jails and prisons early as part of a plan to
fill a corrections shortfall. And proposals to release some inmates early,
pare down parole periods or reject the return of criminals nabbed in other
states have emerged in Washington, Connecticut, Oregon, Nevada and Oklahoma.

California is facing a nearly $35 billion budget deficit, and leading
Democratic lawmakers are suggesting chopping some sentences to shave state
costs.

Gov. Gray Davis announced last week that the state is facing a $34.8
billion budget deficit over the next 18 months. The Democratic governor
will submit his plan to deal with the deficit in January, and despite his
longtime tough-on-crime stances and hesitancy to parole prisoners, aides
said he has not ruled out any proposals to cut costs.

Davis has long been friendly to law enforcement, including the influential
prison guards union that donated lavishly to his re-election campaign, and
a preliminary list of cuts he proposed largely spared prisons from the
chopping block.

The proposals are stirring up a long-running debate in California over
incarceration of low-level criminals and the controversial Three Strikes
Law. During the boom times of the 1990s, California passed several
anti-crime laws, and the state's prison population has since swelled to
more than 160,000.

Of those prisoners, 61 percent are considered nonviolent offenders, said
Margot Bach, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections. Some 670
prisoners are between 65 and 69 years old while about 500 are older than
70, she said.

Prisoner advocates said the state already is locking up too many people
rather than spending money on rehabilitation, education and job programs
that prevent crime.

"We blame the state's overuse of incarceration for the state's budget
problems to begin with. Basically it has been a waste of money," said
Millard Murphy, a law professor who runs the prisons clinic at University
of California, Davis, law school.

But Lawrence Brown, executive director of the California District Attorneys
Association, said the state "should not seek to remedy budgetary woes by
endangering the safety of our communities."

"Courts have sentenced these inmates to state prison, and it would be
highly improper for these inmates to receive a Christmas gift by way of
early release," Brown said.

Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, the top financial adviser to the
Legislature, has suggested shortening the prison stays of some elderly and
nonviolent prisoners -- excluding drug offenders and those with "Three
Strikes" -- among potential solutions to the state's budget woes.

Hill estimates her proposals would save the state hundreds of millions of
dollars.

The top state senator and the assembly's public safety chairman each have
endorsed studying such proposals. Senate President Pro Tem John Burton has
suggested sending prisoners over age 70 home with electronic monitoring
bracelets or releasing some inmates 10 to 30 days early.

"We're not talking about letting Charlie Manson walk the streets," Burton said.

Republican Assemblyman John Campbell, of Irvine, called such proposals "the
least attractive spending reductions that I can imagine."

"It basically interferes with the process that took place when they were
tried, and that's not something that we would do lightly at all," said
Campbell, the Assembly GOP's pointman on the budget.

But he didn't flatly rule out supporting such a measure, saying "as someone
who believes that we should not be raising taxes, there is no spending
reduction that we won't entertain."