AP/Nick Ut
Arianna Huffington: California's prisons are a budget-busting debacle. There are currently more than 170,000 inmates crammed into prisons designed to hold 100,000 people. Around 40,000 of these prisoners are incarcerated for a drug offense. Enter Prop 5, a ballot initiative that will reduce prison overcrowding, cut costs, and start the state's first drug treatment program for at-risk youth. Given all this, passage of Prop 5 would seem like a no-brainer. Yet Prop 5 is struggling because of a very powerful special interest: the prison guards union. For the guards, prison overcrowding means more overtime pay, so their union has funneled $1.8 million into helping fund an array of ads that blatantly mischaracterize Prop 5 as a "drug dealers bill of rights." Goodbye reform, hello fear. The special interests are, once again, overwhelming the public interest. Click here to read more.
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