Up next, a Texas-style building boom for California’s prison system

Turns out it isn’t the bullet train, or a mega-billion-dollar plan to transfer more of Northern California’s water to the south that threatens to unbalance California’s just-balanced budget. Rather, it’s prisons. Jerry Brown says this morning that the state will resist mass releases of inmates to satisfy a federal court order to make its overcrowded prison system more humane, and will build new prisons instead. That’s to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. (The aerial is of Pelican Bay State Prison, where some of the worst of the state’s criminals are housed.) LA Times