by Tim Kowal on June 18, 2011
I’ve had this tab sitting open on my computer for the past two weeks with the intention of forking over the $5 and reading Steven Levitt’s 1995 paper, The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence From Prison Overcrowding Litigation. Here’s the a-ha line from the abstract:
For each one-prisoner reduction induced by prison overcrowding litigation, the total number of crimes committed increases by approximately 15 per year. The social benefit from eliminating those 15 crimes is approximately $45,000; the annual per prisoner costs of incarceration are roughly $30,000.
As I pointed out in my recent piece on the California prison guards union, the current annual per prisoner cost in California is about $45,000. It would be interesting to see a version of Levitt’s study with updated numbers.
At any rate, this tends to show that though the CCPOA’s motives are bad, some of their goals have some merit. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
by Tim Kowal on June 13, 2011
I will be talking about my recent piece on the CCPOA on KMB 580 AM (Fresno) Tuesday, June 14 at 6:45 7:45 a.m. PST. You can listen online here.
by Tim Kowal on June 6, 2011
Jailing is big business. California spends approximately $9 billion a year on its correctional system, and hosts one in seven of the nation’s prisoners. It has the largest prison population of any state. The number of correctional facilities, the amount of compensation for their unionized staffs, and the total cost of incarcerating a prisoner in the state—$44,563 a year—have exploded over the past 30 years. Over that same period, the quality of the state’s prison system declined precipitously. From the 1940s to the 1960s, California’s correctional system was the envy of the nation: Its wardens held advanced degrees in social work and wrote groundbreaking studies on prisoner reform and reducing recidivism. “California was the model of good correctional management and inmate programming,” says Joan Petersilia in California’s Correctional Paradox of Excess and Deprivation, 37 Crime & Just. 207, 209 (2008), “and its practices profoundly influenced American corrections for over 30 years.”
By the 1980s, however, California began radically reforming its prison system. 
An incarceration rate that had held to 100 to 150 per 100,000 Californians prior to 1980 spiked to over 450 by the year 2000. The prison population surged from less than 25,000 in 1980 to more than 168,000 in 2009. The state’s prison budget swelled to meet the needs of the more than six-fold population increase. Between 1980 and 2000, California built 23 new prisons. New guards were needed to staff the new facilities, increasing their number from approximately 5,600 to nearly 30,000 over the same period. Prior to construction, annual spending on the state’s correctional program amounted to about $675 million, or about 3% of California’s general fund. By 2008, spending topped $10 billion, and consumed almost 11.5% of the state’s general fund.
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by Tim Kowal on May 27, 2011
In the comments on the main page about teachers unions, DensityDuck asks “why teachers—who are most surely highly-educated persons with prized skills—need to be in a union at all,” to which Burt Likko responds “[b]ecause, for the most part, they are selling their labor in a monopsony market, which tends to drive the price of the commodity in question (here, the labor of teachers) down dramatically.” I asked Burt this question in follow-up, but I’m curious if anyone else has a good answer:
Burt,
Here’s something I’ve struggled to understand about that argument. We put the government in charge of building schools. Why? Because it is a matter of public policy entrusted to government. We put the government in charge of designing curricula. Why? Public policy, entrusted to government. We put the government in charge of designing school districts and administering school facilities, etc. Why? Policy, government. All other issues concerning public education are all set by government, all for the same reason: Government just is the body we’ve established to make public policy decisions of this sort.
So why, just when it comes to questions of teachers’ pay and benefits, do we decide government has suddenly become lousy and can’t be trusted to set public policy, and that special interests are the only way to fairly serve the public? The way I see it, if you’re going to make the argument that as to teachers, government is a monopsony and thus can’t be trusted to set good policy for educators, then you’d also have to make the argument with equal force that as to parents and children, government is a monopoly and thus can’t be trusted to set good policy for students.
I’ve made this point before, and the best argument I’ve heard in response is that smaller governments are less likely to be seen as reliably reflecting “public policy,” and are instead in competition with other local governments, thereby driving up the value of getting cheap services and driving down the value of setting good policy. Even if this were the case, is there any other response to the question in the case of unions that negotiate directly with the state rather than with local governments? I ask because I plan to reprise the above argument in my forthcoming piece on the California prison guards union.
by Tim Kowal on May 24, 2011
Blogging has been light as I’ve continued work on a major piece exposing the role of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association—the prison guards’ union—in the state’s eight-fold increase in the number of incarcerations in just three decades, proximately resulting in the U.S. Supreme Court’s injunction requiring the state to release approximately 37,000 convicts back into our communities over the next two years. The public sector union’s improvident and anti-democratic self-dealing in pushing blindly pro-incarceration and anti-rehabilitative state policies has served only to create further demand for prison guards, driving up membership, salaries, and—most importantly—dues, and resulting in a dangerously powerful special interest that prevents the state from addressing the serious problems outlined in the Brown v. Plata opinion.
More to come.
Tim Kowal is an attorney practicing in Orange County, California, Vice President of the 
Tom Van Dyke, businessman, musician, bon vivant and game-show champ (