Norbert Haupt

“Public safety is the priority, and we’ll take care of it,” the governor of California said. “The money is there.”

The governor of California proposes spending $315 million on a prison fix, responding to a federal court order to significantly reduce California’s prison population by sending thousands of inmates to private prisons and vacant county jail cells, hoping to avoid what he said would be a mass release of dangerous felons.

The cost of this program could reach $700 million over two years, with much of the money likely to come from a $1.1 billion reserve fund in the state budget.

The reserve fund must be what the governor means when he says “the money is there.”

I believe that a society’s values are exposed by what that society spends its resources on. After literally raiding public education programs of all levels to benefit the reserve fund, among other things, we are now about to spend this money we took away from our children – on prisoners.

Is that where the values of the people of California really are? Or is this an aberration of our government, committing despicable acts in the name of the people?

Have our politicians not listened to our educators when they told them that every dollar spent on education comes back as seven dollars in savings from social programs, like prisons, later?

When will our government realize that education is the long-term solution to a horrific problem, and that locking people up is a Band-Aid on a bullet hole – a colossal waste of money?

Government by the people? I think not.

Governor Brown, you don’t have my vote on this.