Is California an outlier, in terms of the amount of public resources being funneled into corrections?
A. Yes. Back in 1980 when Jerry Brown was governor, there were about 30,000 people in California prisons, roughly the same as in Texas and New York. So here we are 30 years later: California has more than 170,000 prisoners; New York has about 65,000. We have more prisoners than Texas by a substantial amount. We’ve built 32 new prisons since the early ’80s — and yet they’re still jammed to the rafters. There are Southern states with higher rates of incarceration, but there’s no state where the numbers of people incarcerated has grown as dramatically in recent years. It’s very important to remember that these high incarceration rates are not related to public safety. New York State over the last 10 years has experienced the largest reduction in crime in the country. Not because it “got tough” on crime by locking up the criminals. It reduced its prison population during that time, and has a much lower imprisonment rate than California. The California county that has seen the most signific
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