California legislators are resisting Gov. Pete Wilson's push to build six new prisons with counter-proposals in favor of community based corrections. The concept has caught on in at least 18 states, primarily for cost-saving reasons. The issue will come to a head this month in California, but could signal eventually a rethink of the state's penal policy. PNS contributing editor Mary Ellen Leary, a veteran political observer of California, writes for the London-based Economist.

California's budget for next year is stalled over two conflicting views about how to handle criminals -- imprison all felons or sentence the non-violent, less serious felons to community punishment. The issue is critical in a state which has more people locked up (156,000) than any other.

Gov. Pete Wilson (R.) has proposed a $2 billion bond issue for the November ballot to add six new prisons to the state's current total of 32. Some legislators insist the construction plan be cut in half and the money saved be used to subsidize community correctional programs -- military-style boot camps, drug and alcohol treatment, community service under strict supervision, home confinement with electronic monitoring. Last year similar community correction proposals were vetoed by the governor.

The issue will come to a head before June 27 -- the deadline for filing a bond issue for the November ballot. Should California opt for the community corrections approach, it could reinforce a small but significant counter-trend to the national prison-building spree.

So far eight states -- Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, New Jersey and South Carolina -- have built programs based on the community corrections approach while 11 others have adopted some portion of the idea.

The key incentive isn't compassion but money. Prison construction and maintenance is swamping state budgets across the country. In 1979, there were 791 state prisons in the 50 states, according to the National Institute for Justice; by 1996, the figure had nearly doubled. Construction costs for maximum security prisons today average about $80,000 per bed while the average annual maintenance cost per inmate runs to $15,513 (many states spend an average of $22.000).

Nowhere is the gap in per-capita costs between incarceration and community supervision wider than California, which this year will spend $3.8 billion on building and running prisons. The state predicts the total will be $5 billion by the year 2000. The bulge in prison costs is cutting deeply into other state programs, notably higher education.

"We have created 10,000 new jobs in the prison system and those jobs are financed by cutting 10,000 jobs out of the university and state college systems," says state Senator Bill Lockyer (D) who presides over California's upper legislative house and, together with assemblyman and former sheriff Richard Rainey (R), is sponsoring the shift to community corrections.

In Oregon, where nine percent of the general fund now goes into prison building and operation and only eight percent into higher education (reversing funding priorities in just five years), Gov. John Kitzhaber is stumping to expand the community corrections program.

University of California law professor Franklin Zimring, author of several books on criminal justice, believes the new interest in community corrections reflects a broader trend few Americans are aware of. "We used to send drunk drivers to jail," he says. "No more. It used to be a crime to be a vagrant... Today we have decriminalized this status, calling it homelessness, and we urge private charity to meet the problem. Youthful truancy used to be classed as a crime; today we want other social systems to deal with school absence." Zimring predicts the trend could ultimately reshape criminal justice.

Dr. Barry Krisberg, head of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, is less sanguine. "The trouble with community corrections programs (like electronic monitoring) is that they haven't made a dent in prison numbers," he says. "Rather than reducing the incoming flood of convicts at prison gates, they just widen the net of official supervision over people."

If, as Krisberg suggests, local correction programs prove to be an intermediate step to incarceration rather than an alternative, political support will dry up quickly. But advocates argue that the debate over local corrections could force attention to the whole question of degrees in criminality and appropriate punishment.

In California, reform ideas are likely to be derailed this election year by the public sentiment in favor of strong state prisons and stiffer punishment, and by Gov. Wilson's determination to stay at the head of the pack. But they may eventually signal a serious re-think of the state's penal policy.