If there's one thing the California Legislature does well, it's that it always manages to outdo itself at doing nothing.

California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass has cobbled together a stripped-down version of a Senate- approved plan to trim the state's prison population by 27,000 inmates. The Assembly version releases 10,000 fewer but loses about $200 million in savings.

Debate is set for this week.

Don't bother. It's all rubbish. It was rubbish even before it got to the Senate.

They're going to release jailed inmates early by moving them from state prisons to facilities operated by counties. Yet they're taking money out of the counties so they can pay the state deficit, while asking the counties to pick up the tab for the inmates they're going to dump on the counties. Is there any logic in moving state prisoners to county facilities when the government is taking money from the counties to pay state bills? Where are the counties supposed to get the money to house the inmates – by raising taxes?

Even worse, this proposal has to pass in order for the last budget compromise to work. If this measure blows up, the budget blows up. As it is, the Assembly version still leaves the state short by $200 million, and Bass says she has no idea how the Legislature will make that up.

But here's the reality: It doesn't matter what the Legislature decides. We're only doing this minor revision because a federal court ordered it. It's a waste of time; the answer is a complete overhaul of the entire California correctional system. It is an unmitigated failure, and we are its architects. We built it, we perpetuated it and we ignored the consequences. We went from a model system 40 years ago that every state tried to emulate to a national embarrassment that every state today now tries to avoid.

We facilitated this when we decided to get tough on crime. We increased parole sanctions, and gave jail time to nonviolent drug offenders. We eliminated indeterminate sentencing and implemented a three strikes law. We made no distinction between murders and shoplifters or drug dealers and drug users.

The once-great vocational programs at Folsom that trained inmates to be butchers, landscapers and carpenters have been largely shuttered. Money for teachers was cut, money to remove asbestos found in the butcher shop was denied. The class closed.

Folsom's Braille program teaches inmates to translate books for the blind. In 20 years, not one inmate who participated in that program ever returned to prison. This year, only 19 inmates can take the class because there's no money.

It costs about $100,000 to run such programs but instead, 70 percent of the $12 billion prison budget goes to pay salaries and benefits to the union and staff. Just 5 percent goes to education and vocational programs.

Of Folsom's 4,400 inmates, nearly 1,800 read below the ninth-grade level; nearly 400 read below the fourth-grade level. Eighty-five percent of these men will be released from prison. Is it any wonder that 70 percent of them will be returned to prison? Coincidentally, Folsom was designed to hold just 1,800 inmates.

Three decades ago, California housed 20,000 inmates in state prisons. Many who were released never returned. Today, we have 167,000 inmates and the highest recidivism rate in the country.

In that same period, the corrections union went from 2,600 officers to 45,000. In 1980, they made $15,000 a year; today, one in 10 makes more than $100,000 annually.

This is what tough on crime begat. It sounded great all those years on the campaign trail, but lawmakers got lazy. It's easy to be tough on crime when the prison union donates thousands of dollars to your campaign (or a million dollars when you endorse "three strikes," like Pete Wilson did in 1994).

It's easy to be tough on crime when you know that fear and anger can dupe voters into forgetting the consequences of going from a successful rehabilitative program to a wasteful, punitive one. Fear and anger are good motivators, but they are not good decision-makers.

If this is what tough on crime begat, would you call this a success? Then why do we keep doing it?

When you have a 70 percent recidivism rate, you are failing. We keep saying that government needs to act more like a business. If you had that kind of a failure rate anywhere in private business, you'd be out of business.

We need to look at this issue in practical terms and get past emotional questions of whether we're being soft or hard on crime. That's not the issue here. The issue is whether the money we are investing in someone we put in prison is money well invested. If that person gets out and comes back, it is money wasted, not invested.

Anything this Legislature proposes that isn't a complete overhaul is nothing more than a three-card monte shell game, and you won't find a pea under any of those shells, just a pathetic monkey hustle.

Bruce Maiman is a former evening radio talk-show host for KFBK who lives in Rocklin.