Three Strikes For California's Prisons

As an observer of the United States Supreme Court, I watched with interest as the court's liberal wing (along with swing vote Anthony Kennedy) recently upheld two class-action suits claiming California's prisons are overcrowded and provide inadequate medical and psychiatric care. The high court ruled the state must reduce its prison population by a staggering 33,000 inmates.

While my instincts tell me the high court has no business in such matters, the fact remains that California's prisons are indeed overcrowded, despite the fact the state alone has 33 prisons and a budget of about $12 billion. Why are the state prisons breathtakingly expensive? Some of it has to do with the ridiculous Three-Strikes law and some of it has to do with bloated contracts for the union guards who support that same law.

But that is neither here nor there. What I hope this case brings is a renewed debate in this country about incarceration in general. Can there be any doubt that we send far too many people to prison for too long for relatively minor offenses?

In fact, I would go one step farther and question the whole notion of incarcerating non-violent offenders. Is sending them to prison effective? Based on the fact that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, I'd say no. The U.S has 5% of the world's population but fully one quarter of all the world's inmates. And we have a crime rate that, depending on whose statistics you trust, ranges from average to among the world's worst.

Maybe — just maybe — a different approach would save taxpayers a lot of money and provide a different outcome. Or am I just dreaming?

Have a Very Columbia Christmas!

Lee Bollinger

This story makes me sick to my stomach. Really. I nearly lost my Cuban sandwich while reading about this over lunch today.

First we had the case of Kelo vs. New London  -- an egregious abuse of the concept of eminent domain in which the Supreme Court of the United States said it was OK for a municipality to seize the property of ordinary residents -- not to build a school or a highway, but to hand it over to private developers.

At the time, I could not have envisioned an eminent domain case as appalling as that of Kelo. But now we have that same U.S. Supreme Court refusing to hear the case of two small business owners in Manhattan who have been locking horns with an Ivy League university that wants to expand.

The New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, has overturned a lower-court decision that would have blocked Columbia University from using the power of the state to condemn properties in West Harlem to satisfy university President Lee Bollinger's "vision" of new space for the Business School, the School of the Arts, and the Jerome L. Greene Science Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior.

As bad as the Kelo case was, at least its underlying premise was that the increased tax revenue generated by the developers would satisfy the constitutional requirement that there be a public gain or accommodation from the condemnation (ironically, five years after the decision, the property still sits undeveloped).

As Megan McArdle has pointed out, this latest decision will force two tax-paying businesses to sell against their will to a private organization that is largely tax-exempt and that predominantly serves the wealthy and the powerful. Could someone explain to me how this is a "public good?" A statement from the Empire State Development Corporation, the agency with the power to invoke eminent domain, was laughable:

This victory represents a significant step toward achieving the many goals of the project, including strengthening New York as an international center for premier education and academic research programs, improving facilities and infrastructure within the footprint and the surrounding community, generating thousands of jobs for New Yorkers and creating much-needed open space in the neighborhood.

And Bollinger's was even worse:

There's no question I’ve devoted myself to this conception of the future of the University. It all follows from a belief that one of the problems that interferes with Columbia’s potential ... is space, and this effectively solves that problem.

It solves your problem, all right, Mr. Bollinger. Man, this is the very essence of the arrogance of power -- both on the part of the judiciary and academia. Merry Christmas, gentlemen ...

AMK

I've been thinking a lot about the federal judge's recent decision striking down Prop 8, the California ballot initiative that essentially banned gay marriage.

We all know this case will eventually wind up in the SCOTUS and we know the ideological split that currently exists on the high court. And ever since Sandra Day O'Connor retired, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has been the swing vote.

So why don't we just dispense with the drama, hold a cocktail party in Georgetown, get Kennedy all liquored up and ask him what he thinks? It'd save us all a lot of trouble, don't you think?