Word: californiaisms
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...many states are now having trouble affording to keep so many people locked up. Some states are cutting incarceration expenses by consolidating prisons; some are trying to slash prison-food and health-care costs. But real savings come only when you reduce prison populations, and so some states - including California, Colorado and Kentucky - have begun releasing inmates early. "The pressure in state legislatures all over the country is to bring down the populations, because we just can't afford the level of punishment that we've had the last 20 years," says Joan Petersilia, a criminologist at Stanford Law School...
Some states, like Colorado, are launching new efforts to help the recently released find housing and secure other social services. California has allocated some $42 million for an entire re-entry facility - a former prison for women - where inmates within a year of release will get training and, if needed, substance-abuse counseling. But other states may be flirting with disaster by cutting re-entry programs even as they let some inmates go early. The state of Washington was having trouble releasing some of its inmates early because they had no place to live. Now the state is helping roughly...
...harder for those who are already out on parole to return to prison. Parolees who commit minor infractions - missing a meeting with a parole officer, for instance - account for an astonishing proportion of incarceration costs. "Every year," Stanford's Petersilia told the Los Angeles Times recently, "[the state of California] sends some 70,000 parolees back to prison, about 30,000 from L.A. County alone. Most serve two to three months. Everybody knows this revolving door does not protect the public ... These are the lower-level people who may have been in drug treatment [on the outside], may have found...
...definitely work hard to soften the RTT language and then work to undermine the implementation." The Administration believes it can overcome resistance to its plans. Eight states have amended or removed laws to make themselves friendlier to charter schools, partly in anticipation of Duncan's pot of gold. And California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing hard to drop a law that prevents state officials from using student data to evaluate teachers...
...stillness that worried firefighters most. The wildfires that now annually singe Southern California came early this year, spreading slowly from drought-stricken wilderness to the foothills near Los Angeles. Fire season is usually worst in October, when the hot Santa Ana winds blow over the San Gabriel Mountains. But this inferno needed no wind--the Station fire in Angeles National Forest burned more than 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares), threatened thousands of homes and killed two firefighters in the dry heat of late summer. The stillness kept the flames from spreading quickly--a climatologist called it the "Jabba...