Schwarzenegger's Far Left Criminal Justice Crusade
Jonathan King
July 29, 2005
In his most recent state of the state speech, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared war on the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA, the union that represents state prison and parole officers) by declaring he was going to reform the prison system by taking control of it away from union leaders who belonged behind bars. This was a curious statement given the fact that only months before the union had agreed to reopen its five year contract and had given Schwarzenegger $108 million in delayed salary concessions that he used to add more smog to a smoke and mirrors budget he was crafting.
Arnold’s demonization of elected union leaders and, by proxy, the sworn officers they represent, was a masterful exercise in the lowest form of demogogery. In one political surprise attack Arnold divorced his appointed corrections chief, Roderick Hickman, from the line employees of the agency he leads, while blaming those in the ranks for the real and imagined ills of the system. Finally, the Schwarzenegger Big Lie that Gray Davis had given operational control of the prisons to CCPOA shielded his appointees --- all career bureaucrats who had thrived as wardens and higher in the system he claimed to be reforming --- from criticism of their roles as mangers in the corrupt prison service.
Schwarzenegger could not have pulled this off had he bushwhacked any other group of employees in any other public sector. He tried briefly with the teacher unions but was soundly rebuffed by both their Democrat supporters in the legislature and misguided public opinion. Not so with the prison guards who quickly discovered that they had few friends on either side of the aisle at the capitol despite spending many millions of dollars in a sophisticated PAC operation that fed the campaign coffers of office holders of both parties. All but a few of new Democrats who now populate the term limited legislature are natural enemies of prison officers and any other members of the forces of order in our great nation. On the other hand, the Republicans are blindly following a governor who has embarked on a criminal justice crusade that traces its origins to far left propaganda that assumes the worst about our society.
To put this into perspective one must understand the extent to which the hate-America-first, counter-culture, New Left radical thought of the Vietnam-era has come to dominate the once great institutions in our society. This New Left mind set became entrenched first in the Politically Correct bastions of academy. It is a world view that explains get tough on crime legislation as a "prison-industrial complex" conspiracy that profits by throwing the downtrodden lower classes into our penitentiaries. It is an outlook that views police officers as an occupying force in the urban slums where they risk their lives. It is a perspective that believes convicted criminals are the victims of the racist and oppressive power structure that the police protect. It is a mentality that sincerely believes that the Armed Forces of the United States are a focus of evil in the world and any enemy of America must be right.
I firmly believe that law enforcement, corrections, the military and our intelligence services are the forces of order that keep our society from descending into the abyss of barbarism. Every free society must maintain forces of order to deal with the reprobates who will not abide by the social contract. The law enforcement officers and prison guards do the dirty and dangerous work of keeping the peace at home while the military and intelligence services conduct the grim and often deadly business of defending our way of life abroad.
Most Americans instinctively understand this and stand behind the forces of order who protect them. Millions of yellow ribbons and "support out troops" bumper stickers vividly demonstrate this. The public has little compassion for murderers, rapists, child molesters, drug pushers and other criminals who rob them of their hard earned money and steal their property. They overwhelmingly support the police who protect them from this rabble. They also want convicted felons to be kept securely behind the electrified fences of our prisons. To the extent that good citizens give it any thought, they want released criminals supervised by well armed parole officers who enforce the law and always err on the side of public safety, not coddled by social workers. Finally, the average American doesn't get confused about who the real victims are. That makes the public very much at odds --- even in Big Blue California --- with the very unconventional "conventional wisdom" of academia.
The disconnect from the beliefs and values of the American public also exists in spades with the second American institution to be dominated by the New Left's refugees, the main stream media (MSM). The press is unyielding in exposing alleged misconduct by police officers in LA or wounded combat marines fighting for their lives in Faluja. The MSM never misses a chance to pile on when the forces of order are under attack and has led a pitiless assault against California's prison and parole system for decades.
The MSM regards any statements from representatives of the forces of order --- be they a brigadier general in Baghdad, a police chief explaining an officer involved shooting in Oakland, or a CCPOA steward at San Quentin --- as immediately suspect. On the other hand, the MSM prints and broadcasts the opinions of professors, lawyers representing felons and traitors, and other odd angry self appointed "community activists" as the gospel truth.
Of course to buy into the New Left's twaddle one must ignore certain indisputable facts. Most academics and the MSM do just that. To continue the myth of a racist criminal justice system, you must ignore the fact that white males now make up a minority of the line and management staff in most urban police departments and in California's prison and parole service. To call the lowest crime rates in thirty years a public policy disaster --- as the political, academic and media elites in California are now doing --- you must change the meaning of public safety from protection of the innocent to "rehabilitation" of society’s most anti-social and dangerous outlaws.
The election of the New Left's chief ideologue, Tom Hayden, to the State Assembly in 1982 was the harbinger of things to come in California. In a slow process --- escalated later by term limits and a Big Blue gerrymander --- emotional far left radicals replaced the more rational liberals of that party who had held legislative office in California. These new legislators are a bunch who spent their formative years seething with hatred against America as they opposed the Vietnam War and supported "revolutionaries" like the most infamous prisoner-psychopath, George Jackson, and Oakland's most notorious pimp and cop killer, Huey P. Newton.
These firebrands are more inclined to view prison inmates as victims of society and the prison officers who police them as brutal fascists. These weird new Democrats won't exactly define their beliefs as starkly as I do, but their actions betray them. California is a one party state as far the legislature goes and these emotional radicals were kept in check only their ambitions for higher office, more rational fellow Democrats and a Republican minority that exercised power beyond its numbers because it takes a super majority to approve budgets.
California's crime rates have dropped in direct proportion to the increases in the number of inmates in its prisons. That is indisputable. That is the result of bipartisan agreement as to the best way to fight crime. When timid, more emotional, legislators balked at some tough anti-crime measures, a more rational, and very angry electorate forced the issue and passed the nation's first "3 strikes" initiative. The electorate also put its money where its mouth was and passed a succession of prison building bond initiatives, sparking the greatest prison expansion in the history of the free world. The state’s inmate standing count stood at about 30,000 when I went on the job as a guard in 1982 and its over 160,000 today. However, contrary to MSM myths and academic fiction, Californians weren't too tough on crime as the state's incarceration rates are in line with the national average and only one in every seven convicted felons goes to prison today.
Without doubt Tom Hayden and a handful of other like minded radicals in the legislature simmered as the cellblocks were built throughout the San Joaquin Valley and felons were incarcerated in record numbers. Their radical inclinations were kept in check by both public opinion and the more conservative members of their own caucus. Sixteen straight years of two Republican governors gave them no access to the executive branch. The election of Gray Davis didn't change things too much for these radicals: he was a pretty hard nut to crack on law and order issues and supported California's forces of order.
The prison system did remain under constant MSM and legal attack. One of the prime targets of legislative, academic and MSM abuse as been California's parole system. Critics had help from fellow travelers within the parole division's upper management. The division has been dominated by liberal types who prefer social work to law enforcement. These poltroon executives also adopted a definition of parole success that measures any return to prison of a released felon for any reason as a failure.
This is a definition shared by academia and the odd collection of angry radicals and so called fiscal conservatives in the legislature who have bought into it for different reasons. The radicals want parole turned into a social service hand out agency for criminals while the conservatives want it eliminated. Any number of special commissions have bought the parole failure definition as they lambasted the division. It is hardly surprising given that these commissions are made up of rich businessmen with political connections and no corrections experience who are advised by academics.
The conventional wisdom as put forth first by academics, then the MSM, later activist federal judges, and finally by the political classes holds that California's prison and parole system is out-of-control and in dire need of reform. In truth, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) is more accountable than any other agency in state government. In truth, those other agencies don't have to deal with riots, population increases, escalating medical costs and 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals decisions that significantly effect the costs of keeping order in our prisons and enforcing parole conditions on the streets. In truth, the CDC is actually much more accountable for how it spends the public treasure than any public school district.
The emotional critics of the CDC throw out the $5.8 billion a year it costs to operate the prisons and parole offices without putting that figure in context. It is indeed a lot of money but the state's budget is about $117 billion. Those more rational among us consider the $30,000 a year cost of locking up a felon --- who does about half a million a year in damage to the community when he is free --- as money well spent.
The critics ignore the fact that the average first termer released to parole supervision in California has a rap sheet that includes seven felony convictions. Many inmates and parolees have served multiple prison terms. Parole agents in our state are supervising career criminals, not offenders who went on a joy ride in a stolen car and smoked some pot.
Another Big Lie that has become conventional wisdom is that the pre-Schwarzenegger CDC didn't offer rehabilitation opportunities to inmates. We did, but most of the career criminals who populated CDC's penitentiaries didn't want to be reformed. The same applies today.
Of course, the enemies of order continue to lambast the prisons for not trying to rehabilitate hard core criminals, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. They compare California to states that incarcerate nearly half of their convicted felons, meaning corrections authorities in those states are dealing with a lot of offenders who are actually amenable to treatment.
Even on the tough mainline of the Corcoran State Prison in 1988, I helped police an area that included a state-of-the-art furniture factory and welding, upholstery, auto engine repair, sheet metal and body & fender repair vocational shops. In other areas of the prison inmates could attend Adult Basic Education classes that led the motivated ones to GEDs.
With the exception of the furniture factory, which paid well, and the welding shop, a never ending source of well crafted shanks and other bone crushing weapons, inmates had to be forced into these rehabilitation programs. At any given time about half of these reforming felons were very disruptive students, taking away from the time the dedicated instructors had to spend with the more motivated prisoners.
Schwarzenegger was swept into office promising to reform the entire state government. Playing to the same MSM, academic and political elites that unfairly savaged him during the recall election, he foolishly decided to make his first transformation project the CDC. He did this at a time when the crime rate in California was at its lowest since well before the prison expansion started in the mid 1980s. Arnold hand picked Roderick Hickman, an uneducated career CDC bureaucrat, as his corrections reform point man.
Like his boss, Hickman also knows how to play to the crowd and promptly curried favor with two of California's most radical politicians, State Senators Gloria Romero and Jackie Speire, both harsh critics of the CDC. Hickman apologized for parole revocation rates, took ownership the soon to be discredited parole model he would significantly reduce the prison population by returning far fewer parole violators to custody.
Hickman then cooked the books on a budget that promised to change the behavior of career criminals in one budget cycle and factored in huge cost savings. Hickman used these projections to close the training center and he instituted a hiring freeze for correctional officers and parole agents, actions that soon cost millions in overtime and jeopardized the safety of staff, the public and inmates as prison populations climed and parole caseloads skyrocketed.
In practice, the new model forced agents to ignore serious violations of parole conditions until Hickman’s "stakeholders" were arrested by the police and sent back to prison for new felonies. In short order a huge spike in admissions of parole violators with new prison terms threw the Hickman prison budget out of kilter as thousands of them were returned to prison. Once again playing to the radicals, Hickman fired the CDC deputy director in charge of parole operations.
Hickman eventually terminated the parole model(in violation of a an ill advised consent decree he and Schwarzenegger had entered into with much fanfare on their first day in office) on orders from Arnold who caved in after a series of media attack ads by victims' rights groups
Hickman also reprised every Big Lie concerning the men and women in the department he oversees and promised he was the man who would reform the corrupt system he had thrived in. Instead of telling the legislature and his boss that many of our "problems" were the result of federal judges acting as ombudsmen for violent prisoners and activists, he promised to cooperate with the most fanatic of them. Instead of informing all who would listen that CDC's well publicized budget over-runs were largely a result of inmate population increases, riots and other events beyond our control, he kowtowed and promised to cut costs.
If Hickman were a more honest man he might have added that CDC's prisons have become much more costly to operate because reforms concerning the use-of-force by prison officers have encouraged inmate violence of all forms. He could also have added that CDC's prisons still serve their intended purpose by incapacitating law breakers by removing them from our communities. A better man might have announced that parole agents couldn't be expected to correct anti-social, criminal lifestyles that have taken twenty to fifty years to develop, but they could do their best to assist change for those willing to try while making public safety priority number one. If Hickman were a truth teller he would have announced that parole success in many cases requires sending sex offenders and other violent criminals back to prison at the first hint of a parole violation.
While Hickman and Schwarzenegger were at it he could have told gal radicals Romero and Speire that $50,000 a year wasn't too much to pay a prison guard working a graveyard shift alone and unarmed in a dormitory populated by 300 convicts in space designed for 150 and that $75,000 for a parole agent making home visits alone in the worst neighborhoods in the state was money well spent.
Hickman is not a learned man but he has been a prodigal participant in CDC in-service training programs and other government sponsored learning venues. In fact, he spent most of his "guard time" in the safety of the CDC training academy. Anyone who might argue that Hickman's lack of education beyond high school may be a plus given the bias of professors against the forces of order, doesn't understand much about the training programs government employees are subjected too. What passes for training is in most cases abbreviated versions of the most radical thought at the universities. Training government employees is big business in America. Professors, who condemn capitalism when practiced by businessmen, are rewarded handsomely as they create lesson plans for the radical feminists and ponytail wearing metrosexuals who proselytize civil servants with leftwing, secular malarkey. Throughout his mediocre career Hickman volunteered for the "training" that many of us actively avoided or slept through when that was not possible.
Arnold's prison and parole Messiah has bought into this reincarnated New Left hate-America-first nonsense. He can spout off the most popular PC buzzwords like a sociology professor. In a move so harebrained it serves as the perfect example of symbolism over substance, Hickman talked Arnold and the legislature into adding “and Rehabilitation” the name of the CDC. Hickman apparently doesn't understand that corrections is defined as the "custody, treatment and rehabilitation" of convicted criminals. That this name changed was vetted by Schwazenegger's staff proves how scatterbrained that crew is.
Schwazenegger and Hickman have also very quietly reversed the public policy of two Republican governors and Gray Davis in regards to convicted murderers serving life prison sentences, approving the release of more of these killers from prison in the brief period Arnold has been in office than were paroled in the two decades before his administration. By law, Schwarzenegger has to review and personally approve every release decision. The MSM has ignored this reform. It is a criminal justice practice that might alarm the public; however, it doesn't fit the template the MSM uses for coverage of prison issues.
Arnold Schwazenegger is rapidly dismantling long standing, bipartisan public policy as it relates to criminal justice. In his mixed up administration, the lowest crime rates in over a generation are a sign of failure because too many career criminals are in prison. His reforms promise to leave dangerous convicted felons in our communities. Arnold has bought into a reform platform that places the "treatment" needs of violent career criminals and sexual deviants ahead of the public safety.
Arnold’s demonization of elected union leaders and, by proxy, the sworn officers they represent, was a masterful exercise in the lowest form of demogogery. In one political surprise attack Arnold divorced his appointed corrections chief, Roderick Hickman, from the line employees of the agency he leads, while blaming those in the ranks for the real and imagined ills of the system. Finally, the Schwarzenegger Big Lie that Gray Davis had given operational control of the prisons to CCPOA shielded his appointees --- all career bureaucrats who had thrived as wardens and higher in the system he claimed to be reforming --- from criticism of their roles as mangers in the corrupt prison service.
Schwarzenegger could not have pulled this off had he bushwhacked any other group of employees in any other public sector. He tried briefly with the teacher unions but was soundly rebuffed by both their Democrat supporters in the legislature and misguided public opinion. Not so with the prison guards who quickly discovered that they had few friends on either side of the aisle at the capitol despite spending many millions of dollars in a sophisticated PAC operation that fed the campaign coffers of office holders of both parties. All but a few of new Democrats who now populate the term limited legislature are natural enemies of prison officers and any other members of the forces of order in our great nation. On the other hand, the Republicans are blindly following a governor who has embarked on a criminal justice crusade that traces its origins to far left propaganda that assumes the worst about our society.
To put this into perspective one must understand the extent to which the hate-America-first, counter-culture, New Left radical thought of the Vietnam-era has come to dominate the once great institutions in our society. This New Left mind set became entrenched first in the Politically Correct bastions of academy. It is a world view that explains get tough on crime legislation as a "prison-industrial complex" conspiracy that profits by throwing the downtrodden lower classes into our penitentiaries. It is an outlook that views police officers as an occupying force in the urban slums where they risk their lives. It is a perspective that believes convicted criminals are the victims of the racist and oppressive power structure that the police protect. It is a mentality that sincerely believes that the Armed Forces of the United States are a focus of evil in the world and any enemy of America must be right.
I firmly believe that law enforcement, corrections, the military and our intelligence services are the forces of order that keep our society from descending into the abyss of barbarism. Every free society must maintain forces of order to deal with the reprobates who will not abide by the social contract. The law enforcement officers and prison guards do the dirty and dangerous work of keeping the peace at home while the military and intelligence services conduct the grim and often deadly business of defending our way of life abroad.
Most Americans instinctively understand this and stand behind the forces of order who protect them. Millions of yellow ribbons and "support out troops" bumper stickers vividly demonstrate this. The public has little compassion for murderers, rapists, child molesters, drug pushers and other criminals who rob them of their hard earned money and steal their property. They overwhelmingly support the police who protect them from this rabble. They also want convicted felons to be kept securely behind the electrified fences of our prisons. To the extent that good citizens give it any thought, they want released criminals supervised by well armed parole officers who enforce the law and always err on the side of public safety, not coddled by social workers. Finally, the average American doesn't get confused about who the real victims are. That makes the public very much at odds --- even in Big Blue California --- with the very unconventional "conventional wisdom" of academia.
The disconnect from the beliefs and values of the American public also exists in spades with the second American institution to be dominated by the New Left's refugees, the main stream media (MSM). The press is unyielding in exposing alleged misconduct by police officers in LA or wounded combat marines fighting for their lives in Faluja. The MSM never misses a chance to pile on when the forces of order are under attack and has led a pitiless assault against California's prison and parole system for decades.
The MSM regards any statements from representatives of the forces of order --- be they a brigadier general in Baghdad, a police chief explaining an officer involved shooting in Oakland, or a CCPOA steward at San Quentin --- as immediately suspect. On the other hand, the MSM prints and broadcasts the opinions of professors, lawyers representing felons and traitors, and other odd angry self appointed "community activists" as the gospel truth.
Of course to buy into the New Left's twaddle one must ignore certain indisputable facts. Most academics and the MSM do just that. To continue the myth of a racist criminal justice system, you must ignore the fact that white males now make up a minority of the line and management staff in most urban police departments and in California's prison and parole service. To call the lowest crime rates in thirty years a public policy disaster --- as the political, academic and media elites in California are now doing --- you must change the meaning of public safety from protection of the innocent to "rehabilitation" of society’s most anti-social and dangerous outlaws.
The election of the New Left's chief ideologue, Tom Hayden, to the State Assembly in 1982 was the harbinger of things to come in California. In a slow process --- escalated later by term limits and a Big Blue gerrymander --- emotional far left radicals replaced the more rational liberals of that party who had held legislative office in California. These new legislators are a bunch who spent their formative years seething with hatred against America as they opposed the Vietnam War and supported "revolutionaries" like the most infamous prisoner-psychopath, George Jackson, and Oakland's most notorious pimp and cop killer, Huey P. Newton.
These firebrands are more inclined to view prison inmates as victims of society and the prison officers who police them as brutal fascists. These weird new Democrats won't exactly define their beliefs as starkly as I do, but their actions betray them. California is a one party state as far the legislature goes and these emotional radicals were kept in check only their ambitions for higher office, more rational fellow Democrats and a Republican minority that exercised power beyond its numbers because it takes a super majority to approve budgets.
California's crime rates have dropped in direct proportion to the increases in the number of inmates in its prisons. That is indisputable. That is the result of bipartisan agreement as to the best way to fight crime. When timid, more emotional, legislators balked at some tough anti-crime measures, a more rational, and very angry electorate forced the issue and passed the nation's first "3 strikes" initiative. The electorate also put its money where its mouth was and passed a succession of prison building bond initiatives, sparking the greatest prison expansion in the history of the free world. The state’s inmate standing count stood at about 30,000 when I went on the job as a guard in 1982 and its over 160,000 today. However, contrary to MSM myths and academic fiction, Californians weren't too tough on crime as the state's incarceration rates are in line with the national average and only one in every seven convicted felons goes to prison today.
Without doubt Tom Hayden and a handful of other like minded radicals in the legislature simmered as the cellblocks were built throughout the San Joaquin Valley and felons were incarcerated in record numbers. Their radical inclinations were kept in check by both public opinion and the more conservative members of their own caucus. Sixteen straight years of two Republican governors gave them no access to the executive branch. The election of Gray Davis didn't change things too much for these radicals: he was a pretty hard nut to crack on law and order issues and supported California's forces of order.
The prison system did remain under constant MSM and legal attack. One of the prime targets of legislative, academic and MSM abuse as been California's parole system. Critics had help from fellow travelers within the parole division's upper management. The division has been dominated by liberal types who prefer social work to law enforcement. These poltroon executives also adopted a definition of parole success that measures any return to prison of a released felon for any reason as a failure.
This is a definition shared by academia and the odd collection of angry radicals and so called fiscal conservatives in the legislature who have bought into it for different reasons. The radicals want parole turned into a social service hand out agency for criminals while the conservatives want it eliminated. Any number of special commissions have bought the parole failure definition as they lambasted the division. It is hardly surprising given that these commissions are made up of rich businessmen with political connections and no corrections experience who are advised by academics.
The conventional wisdom as put forth first by academics, then the MSM, later activist federal judges, and finally by the political classes holds that California's prison and parole system is out-of-control and in dire need of reform. In truth, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) is more accountable than any other agency in state government. In truth, those other agencies don't have to deal with riots, population increases, escalating medical costs and 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals decisions that significantly effect the costs of keeping order in our prisons and enforcing parole conditions on the streets. In truth, the CDC is actually much more accountable for how it spends the public treasure than any public school district.
The emotional critics of the CDC throw out the $5.8 billion a year it costs to operate the prisons and parole offices without putting that figure in context. It is indeed a lot of money but the state's budget is about $117 billion. Those more rational among us consider the $30,000 a year cost of locking up a felon --- who does about half a million a year in damage to the community when he is free --- as money well spent.
The critics ignore the fact that the average first termer released to parole supervision in California has a rap sheet that includes seven felony convictions. Many inmates and parolees have served multiple prison terms. Parole agents in our state are supervising career criminals, not offenders who went on a joy ride in a stolen car and smoked some pot.
Another Big Lie that has become conventional wisdom is that the pre-Schwarzenegger CDC didn't offer rehabilitation opportunities to inmates. We did, but most of the career criminals who populated CDC's penitentiaries didn't want to be reformed. The same applies today.
Of course, the enemies of order continue to lambast the prisons for not trying to rehabilitate hard core criminals, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. They compare California to states that incarcerate nearly half of their convicted felons, meaning corrections authorities in those states are dealing with a lot of offenders who are actually amenable to treatment.
Even on the tough mainline of the Corcoran State Prison in 1988, I helped police an area that included a state-of-the-art furniture factory and welding, upholstery, auto engine repair, sheet metal and body & fender repair vocational shops. In other areas of the prison inmates could attend Adult Basic Education classes that led the motivated ones to GEDs.
With the exception of the furniture factory, which paid well, and the welding shop, a never ending source of well crafted shanks and other bone crushing weapons, inmates had to be forced into these rehabilitation programs. At any given time about half of these reforming felons were very disruptive students, taking away from the time the dedicated instructors had to spend with the more motivated prisoners.
Schwarzenegger was swept into office promising to reform the entire state government. Playing to the same MSM, academic and political elites that unfairly savaged him during the recall election, he foolishly decided to make his first transformation project the CDC. He did this at a time when the crime rate in California was at its lowest since well before the prison expansion started in the mid 1980s. Arnold hand picked Roderick Hickman, an uneducated career CDC bureaucrat, as his corrections reform point man.
Like his boss, Hickman also knows how to play to the crowd and promptly curried favor with two of California's most radical politicians, State Senators Gloria Romero and Jackie Speire, both harsh critics of the CDC. Hickman apologized for parole revocation rates, took ownership the soon to be discredited parole model he would significantly reduce the prison population by returning far fewer parole violators to custody.
Hickman then cooked the books on a budget that promised to change the behavior of career criminals in one budget cycle and factored in huge cost savings. Hickman used these projections to close the training center and he instituted a hiring freeze for correctional officers and parole agents, actions that soon cost millions in overtime and jeopardized the safety of staff, the public and inmates as prison populations climed and parole caseloads skyrocketed.
In practice, the new model forced agents to ignore serious violations of parole conditions until Hickman’s "stakeholders" were arrested by the police and sent back to prison for new felonies. In short order a huge spike in admissions of parole violators with new prison terms threw the Hickman prison budget out of kilter as thousands of them were returned to prison. Once again playing to the radicals, Hickman fired the CDC deputy director in charge of parole operations.
Hickman eventually terminated the parole model(in violation of a an ill advised consent decree he and Schwarzenegger had entered into with much fanfare on their first day in office) on orders from Arnold who caved in after a series of media attack ads by victims' rights groups
Hickman also reprised every Big Lie concerning the men and women in the department he oversees and promised he was the man who would reform the corrupt system he had thrived in. Instead of telling the legislature and his boss that many of our "problems" were the result of federal judges acting as ombudsmen for violent prisoners and activists, he promised to cooperate with the most fanatic of them. Instead of informing all who would listen that CDC's well publicized budget over-runs were largely a result of inmate population increases, riots and other events beyond our control, he kowtowed and promised to cut costs.
If Hickman were a more honest man he might have added that CDC's prisons have become much more costly to operate because reforms concerning the use-of-force by prison officers have encouraged inmate violence of all forms. He could also have added that CDC's prisons still serve their intended purpose by incapacitating law breakers by removing them from our communities. A better man might have announced that parole agents couldn't be expected to correct anti-social, criminal lifestyles that have taken twenty to fifty years to develop, but they could do their best to assist change for those willing to try while making public safety priority number one. If Hickman were a truth teller he would have announced that parole success in many cases requires sending sex offenders and other violent criminals back to prison at the first hint of a parole violation.
While Hickman and Schwarzenegger were at it he could have told gal radicals Romero and Speire that $50,000 a year wasn't too much to pay a prison guard working a graveyard shift alone and unarmed in a dormitory populated by 300 convicts in space designed for 150 and that $75,000 for a parole agent making home visits alone in the worst neighborhoods in the state was money well spent.
Hickman is not a learned man but he has been a prodigal participant in CDC in-service training programs and other government sponsored learning venues. In fact, he spent most of his "guard time" in the safety of the CDC training academy. Anyone who might argue that Hickman's lack of education beyond high school may be a plus given the bias of professors against the forces of order, doesn't understand much about the training programs government employees are subjected too. What passes for training is in most cases abbreviated versions of the most radical thought at the universities. Training government employees is big business in America. Professors, who condemn capitalism when practiced by businessmen, are rewarded handsomely as they create lesson plans for the radical feminists and ponytail wearing metrosexuals who proselytize civil servants with leftwing, secular malarkey. Throughout his mediocre career Hickman volunteered for the "training" that many of us actively avoided or slept through when that was not possible.
Arnold's prison and parole Messiah has bought into this reincarnated New Left hate-America-first nonsense. He can spout off the most popular PC buzzwords like a sociology professor. In a move so harebrained it serves as the perfect example of symbolism over substance, Hickman talked Arnold and the legislature into adding “and Rehabilitation” the name of the CDC. Hickman apparently doesn't understand that corrections is defined as the "custody, treatment and rehabilitation" of convicted criminals. That this name changed was vetted by Schwazenegger's staff proves how scatterbrained that crew is.
Schwazenegger and Hickman have also very quietly reversed the public policy of two Republican governors and Gray Davis in regards to convicted murderers serving life prison sentences, approving the release of more of these killers from prison in the brief period Arnold has been in office than were paroled in the two decades before his administration. By law, Schwarzenegger has to review and personally approve every release decision. The MSM has ignored this reform. It is a criminal justice practice that might alarm the public; however, it doesn't fit the template the MSM uses for coverage of prison issues.
Arnold Schwazenegger is rapidly dismantling long standing, bipartisan public policy as it relates to criminal justice. In his mixed up administration, the lowest crime rates in over a generation are a sign of failure because too many career criminals are in prison. His reforms promise to leave dangerous convicted felons in our communities. Arnold has bought into a reform platform that places the "treatment" needs of violent career criminals and sexual deviants ahead of the public safety.
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