 "Photo: Daryl Cagle | Special to the Chronicle")
Rising deficits, collapsing revenue and an impotent legislature have left our state and our public higher education system facing a bleak and uncertain future.
The number of incoming freshman at CSUSB is to be cut by 13 percent for the coming fall in a time when applications were up 30 percent from the previous year across the CSU system.
Clearly, our state’s capacity to meet the need of college-bound individuals is crippled by the inability of our government and the leadership of our educational institution to provide a stable financial base to work upon.
However, the cure to our educational and economic maladies might lie behind the bars of our state prisons. Where our UC and CSU systems have seen increased fees, slashed budgets and curbed enrollment, our state prisons have had to be expanded over the past year, including a measure supported by Governor Arnold. Schwarzenegger to build an extra 53,000 prison beds.
While Schwarzenegger has worked arduously to cut back on prison costs, the effects of these cuts have been nullified by cuts he and the legislature have had to make across the board.
Cutting back on prison expenses while simultaneously expanding the system seems counter-intuitive if not asinine.
If the aim of Sacramento is to make cuts that will sustain our state and allow for growth, then our hope for economic recovery needs to start with higher education, so we must cure the state of one of its most transparent cancers, the prison system.
The core problem lies not with the physical budget attached to our prison system but instead with the legislation that keeps both the budget and our prisoners locked up.
In California, our prison system is impacted not because we have so many new offenders or detainees growing old, our greatest problem is parolees who are returned to sentencing after violating the rights of their parole.
“My research has shown that California's parole system is the major contributor to overcrowding in the prison population, sending about 70,000 parole violators back to prison each year," said UC Irvine Professor Joan Petersilia of the UCI Center for Evidence-Based Corrections.
"About 20 percent of those violators churn in and out of prisons because they commit technical parole violations, not new crimes,” said Joan Petersilia, Professor of Criminology at the University of California Irvine Center for Evidence Based Corrections.
According to the NY Times, California has the most stringent laws in regards to the parole and corrections programs for offenders.
Other states, such as Kansas have been able to cut $12 million from operating costs by instituting a forgiveness policy that allows for parolees to be subjected to clinical assessments following minor violations of parole such as unauthorized change of address or failing to arrive at a parole appointment.
In California, if you break your parole, you are thrown straight back into the prison system.
That’s not to say that Kansas lets it’s most fearsome murderers and rapists loose on the street with nothing more than a slap on the wrist should they not check in on time. Instead, other states allow nonviolent offenders to be released earlier than California and focus more on the rehabilitative and corrections side of the equation.
The incurred cost of continually monitoring parolees and caring for prisoners is a cost California can do without.
Allowing these nonviolent offenders to be given a true second chance will free countless funds to be used elswhere, namely higher education.
For two quarters now, CSUSB has officially been impacted.
To many of us, impaction is just a word meaning times are tough, but to the thousands of applicants to our campus who will face a denial, the consequences are much more real.
With unemployment at 12 percent in California, there is no guarantee that these would-be students will be able to find employment if college is not an option.
California risks losing a generation of college-educated individuals who would contribute to the health of our great state.
Though Schwarzenegger and Sacramento may be preaching the cause, they’re missing the point, and since the highest office of our educational system has been content to run the CSU system into the ground, the changes must come from the bottom up.
That’s not to say that there are those out there that do not understand the perils that face CSUSB and higher education as a whole. CSUSB President Dr. Albert K. Karnig has put his neck on the line for students and staff more often than not in order to retain the highest degree of quality education CSUSB can provide.
Also Marcia Marx, CSUSB’s California Faculty Association chapter president, has worked with both students and faculty to promote awareness of the troubles we face due to the quasi-solution of furloughs.
However the power is out of their hands. It truly rests with us.
Both the leadership of our government and educational institution have failed to recognize the cascade of good fortune that could come from effective prison reform and the allocation of more funds to save higher education.
Thus the responsibility lies with us in hopes of enacting that real bottom-up solution.
The Chronicle has always been an advocate of higher education and worked to support students in achieving their degrees, and it is for those reasons that we asked for your support in the past for such issues as Assembly Bill 656, but now is time for new measures to be taken.
The first step is following suit with the rest of the nation and allowing our nonviolent criminals to depart their cells and free up funds for the rest of the 36 million of us that live in California.
You can’t save California by taking from students and enacting policies that perpetuate an out-of-control budget.
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