California Budget Cuts Offer Chance for Prison Reform

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By Matt Kelley January 24, 2011 09:35 AM (PT)
Posted on http://www.change.org/
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California Budget Cuts Offer Chance for Prison Reform

The painful budget cuts on the horizon in California could have an upside for criminal justice reformers.

When new California Governor Jerry Brown announced $12.5 billion in proposed state funding cuts last week, he included a call to close the state's juvenile prison system by 2014. Community based alternatives to incarceration have been shown to reduce crime and long-term recidivism (in Missouri, for example), and Brown's proposal would move California in that direction. This is progressive leadership, and Brown deserves congratulations for raising the dialogue on juvenile justice alternatives...

We've been making the close-prisons-save-money-reduce-crime argument for years here at change.org, and it's good to see it finally gaining some traction across the political spectrum. Charles wrote recently about the push from such unlikely advocates as Newt Gingrich for another look at wasteful spending on our sprawling prison state. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is echoing Jerry Brown in his call to close empty juvenile facilities across the state....

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