Legal Commentary

Jonathan Simon has a nice post on prison conditions in California in which he observes that California politics have not shifted sufficiently to permit wholesale reform of the culture of incarceration that has destroyed California's budget and blighted the lives of low-income communities. Jonathan emphasizes the political incentives that motivate lawmakers to support fiscally suicidal levels of incarceration, implicitly attributing these incentives to the public's support for vindictive penalties.

But Jonathan ignores one political factor that might be changing in California -- the power of Don Novey's the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA). As the Economist notes here, the CCPOA have been one of California's most potent interest groups, and they have been a powerful lobby for "three strikes, your out" and other senseless sentencing policies that provide jobs for their members. But Novey's union may have over-reached: The wages and benefits of prison guards have reached such insane heights -- the average member of earned around $70,000 a year and more than $100,000 with overtime, with retirement starting at 50 years of age at 90% of salary -- that lawmakers may finally start to revolt.

In any case, the influence of the corrections officers union is so obviously pernicious in California that it might lead legal scholars to revive the old Wellington-Winter hypothesis that public employee unions enjoy excessive political power because of the inelasticity of demand for their services and their high levels of political organization. There is a tendency among Left-leaning academics to see unions as the unadulterated source of beneficial egalitarianism. When, however, such unions control services disproportionately consumed by low-income persons -- incarceration and education, for instance -- they can be deeply inegalitarian. I have commented earlier that the recession is likely to reduce the power of public employee unions in New York City. If the recession operates in this way to oust the CCPOA from their current privileged perch in state politics, then even this economic cloud will have shown a glimmer of a silver lining.