Even still, there must be people in his office who are gleeful about this gift from the federal bench. The latest budget agreement calls for $1.2 billion in cuts in the corrections budget -- with reductions in the prison population by a like amount.
Or as Unger explained, there is little gain in sending the 70,000 parolees with "technical parole violations" to prison and conducting a new battery of diagnostic tests -- to only release them three or four months later. And: "It's not releasing 40,000 inmates as much as it is targeting who comes into state prison in the first place."
But Schwarzenegger tried this in 2004 -- and the result, as the Sacramento Bee reported, was 2,529 fewer inmates in prison on parole violations, but 2,141 more parolees incarcerated for new crimes. Sounds criminogenic to me.