Gov. Newsom’s San Quentin Reforms Not Progressive Enough

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s vision of transforming 171 year-old San Quentin prison into a Norwegian rehabilitation campus, where inmates can wear their own clothes and cook their own food while attending classes to get college degrees and licenses in trades like plumbing and truck driving, is apparently dead.  A story in the Davis Vanguard reports that neither the Senate or the Assembly was willing to vote in support of a $360 million down payment to create a friendlier and happier place for the state’s worst criminals.  The amazing aspect of this news is that perhaps the most progressive group in the state,  Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), which advocates for closing prisons, was strongly opposed, because Newsom’s proposal “does nothing to address the systemic racism and violence that prisons perpetuate.”  Law enforcement and victims groups have been opposed to this plan since it was announced earlier this year as a criminal-coddling pipe dream.  CURB opposes it because it does not coddle criminals enough.   Go figure.