The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  He still preferred a conversation to a photo-op. Occasionally abrupt or socially awkward, he did not, however, radiate the disdain he had once displayed. When he unintentionally slighted people, his wife pointed out his missteps. She added money when he failed to leave a tip and chastised him when his interior monologues interfered with social niceties. He had a dog, which helped soften his image. Kathleen Brown worked in municipal finance in California for Goldman Sachs; when her brother was elected, she transferred to the company’s Chicago office to avoid conflicts of interest and left her corgi with Jerry and Anne. Sutter Brown soon became the wildly popular First Dog, with his own Facebook page and Twitter account, a familiar sight in and around the capitol and the nearby loft where the Browns stayed in Sacramento. The Oakland house was still home, though Jerry held events in the old Mansion and hoped to move in once renovations were complete.

  Anne Gust Brown had a small office near her husband’s in the horseshoe, the warren of offices that made up the governor’s quarters in the capitol. She was an unpaid special counsel, a title she found more comfortable than first lady. “Jerry and I work closely together on any big issues,” she said in an interview with a Sacramento TV station. “If he needs help on them or an extra pair of hands,5 I help dig into things … If he’s off having to do something else I can move the ball forward on other projects.”

  Anne brought a business perspective, and the structure Jerry needed. “I’d say he thinks like more of a long-term visionary and I’m more ‘Let’s make sure every train is running on time,’ ”6 Anne said. Others turned to her for help when Jerry became too deeply immersed or sidetracked. “We do have to corral him7 sometimes because he’s a man who is really amazing in how much he thinks about things, and topics going back to prehistoric times to now, he reads almost anything you can imagine, very complex things, he’s just always exploring, new ideas and new ways. And a lot of times we have to sort of manage him to, what it is we have to decide today. And I can be pretty good at that. Not perfect.”

  Where Jerry was attracted to communal life in part because he worked through issues by verbal interactions, Anne needed solitude to think through problems. She walked the Oakland Hills or went for runs. Once in a while she persuaded Jerry to get away. His first summer as governor, they went hiking in Yosemite. When they did travel, he liked to stay with friends—not only because he was frugal, but because he preferred to see places through the eyes of locals rather than as an ordinary tourist.

  “I have a husband who thinks that his job is like a vacation,”8 Anne said. “He’s like, ‘What do you mean get away from work? This is like a vacation.’ And I said, ‘No, honey, really that is so not true and there’s not a person on the planet who believes that other than you.’ He loves what he does. So to come home and talk about it incessantly is just nirvana for him. I on the other hand am not in that camp. I’ve actually had times when I’ve said to him, ‘Jerry, stop now, shut up, really, do not talk about this. We’re going to read books.’ … He lives this twenty-four seven. And loves it.”

  Jerry returned to govern 38 million Californians, 50 percent more than had lived in the state his first time around. California was emerging from the third and most serious recession in two decades. The recent loss of a million jobs had heightened the disparity between rich and poor. Three decades earlier, the top 1 percent in the state earned about 10 percent of the income. In 2011, the top 1 percent earned 22 percent, or $2 trillion. The shift had come at the expense of the middle class. “We’re not in a caste system9 yet,” Jerry said, “but we’re forming our own little version as it gets harder and harder for people without previous positioning to rise in our society.”

  The concentration of wealth contributed to the extreme volatility of state finances: The top 1 percent paid more than 60 percent of the state’s income tax, much of which was dependent on capital gains. Jerry confronted a $26.6 billion deficit, larger than the entire state budget had been when he became governor the first time. The need to stabilize state finances became the overwhelming focus of his first few years. Options were limited, in part because big chunks of the $120 billion budget were protected by dozens of initiatives that set aside money for specific programs, without adding new revenue. “You have a chess game10 of government with fewer and fewer moves,” Jerry said.

  The yawning gap between revenues and expenditures enabled Jerry to shepherd through deep cuts that would have otherwise been politically unthinkable. In a move important both symbolically and practically, his first budget abolished local redevelopment agencies (RDAs), which had grown from a small program to combat urban renewal into a major drain on state finance. In areas that cities designated as blighted, the RDA could keep any new property tax revenue raised from that area—in effect, siphoning off tax dollars that would have otherwise been distributed to local schools and counties. RDAs had exploded after Prop 13 capped the property tax rate at 1 percent; some cities designated entire downtowns as blighted. By 2008, one out of every eight property tax dollars went to one of about four hundred RDAs across the state. Jerry had used redevelopment money extensively in Oakland, including the restoration of the Fox Theater; now he argued the program was a drain the state could no longer afford. His ability to prevail in eliminating the popular local program spoke to the dire financial times and the relative leadership vacuum.

  Jerry’s indispensable partner in the multidimensional budget puzzle was Ana Matosantos, the young Schwarzenegger administration finance director who had briefed Jerry two years earlier. Like many of Jerry’s cabinet members, she found out that she had been reappointed to her old job from someone else. Jerry was as uncomfortable being thanked as he was thanking others. Matosantos jumped at the chance to join the revolution, much as an earlier generation had done in 1975. She loved matching wits with Jerry and watching his mind work on issues big and small. When the budget leaked out, forcing the administration to hold the press conference a day early, Matosantos was baffled by the governor’s insistence in the middle of last-minute preparation that he needed a showy chart. Afterward he explained: The goal was to avoid news stories that began “In a hastily called press conference …”

  Never one to waste a crisis, Jerry used the budget to significantly reshape the relationship of state government to the counties, cities, and school districts. In addition to dissolving the redevelopment agencies, his plan to stabilize state finances relied on a shift with the deceptively nondescript term “realignment.”

  More than three decades later, almost all major fiscal policies in California could be traced back to the realignment of services after Proposition 13, the seismic shift that occurred while a young Governor Jerry Brown was running for reelection, in between two campaigns for president. Prop 13 mandated that the state allocate property taxes collected at the local level. Under the omnibus law adopted to comply with that requirement, the state assumed a greater share of funding social services and health programs formerly the purview of local governments, which no longer had the ability to set their own tax rates. The law froze the system in time, apportioning funds based on what counties had spent on services before Prop 13; in effect, it institutionalized existing inequalities.

  For better or worse, financial crises often spurred sweeping change that would have otherwise been difficult to achieve. When Pete Wilson became governor in 1991 and faced a huge deficit, part of his solution was to transfer certain health and mental health programs back to the counties. That helped soften a tax increase—money dedicated to fund those programs—and enabled the state to plug a $2 billion hole. Counties gained stable funding and greater flexibility; the state developed formulas that corrected some of the inequities and shifted a greater portion of ongoing costs to the counties. That was Realignment One.

  State money generally came with mandates. Just as states often balked at federal mandates, the fifty-eight far-flung, disparate counties in California often protested that one-size-fits-all directives from Sacramento were inefficient a
nd impractical and robbed them of the ability to craft programs that best met their constituents’ needs. Jerry had campaigned on the promise to move as much decision making as possible to the local level. He argued those closest to problems could devise the most effective solutions. His experience in Oakland and with Catholic doctrine deepened the sense of personal responsibility that he had grown up with. He preached the importance of subsidiarity, a Catholic principle essential to achieving the common good. Starting with the basic unit of the family and moving up through neighborhood, school, city, and state, decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary. Subsidiarity required a balance, imposing state oversight on local decision making.

  In Oakland, Jerry had been confronted daily with the dysfunctional criminal justice system, caused in part by laws he had once championed. Prison spending, 3 percent of the budget when he left office, was 10 percent when he returned. More dollars were spent on prisons than on higher education. For moral, economic, and legal reasons, the prison system became a logical place to begin applying the principle of subsidiarity.

  California’s penal system began with its most notorious prison, San Quentin, opened in 1854 with cells built by inmates who had been housed on a floating prison ship anchored nearby. James “Bluebeard” Watson, who killed seven of his twenty-two wives, was buried in the San Quentin cemetery. Woody Allen filmed scenes at San Quentin for Take the Money and Run. Charles Manson spent much of his prison time in the Q. Johnny Cash played his “At San Quentin” concert in the prison yard. For many years, the whole prison system was San Quentin and Folsom, which opened in 1880 and also was made famous by Cash.

  For several decades after its creation in 1944, the Department of Corrections grew modestly. A total of twelve prisons housed about thirty thousand inmates. With the exception of the Depression years, the number of prisoners relative to the overall population declined as the state grew—until the first governorship of Jerry Brown. Determinate sentencing encouraged the legislature to create new crimes and impose longer sentences, actions Jerry supported. He boasted in 1982 that 19,000 people would go to prison that year—more than double the number when he took office. New crimes and harsher sentences proliferated even faster during the Deukmejian administration, and prison population tripled. A $94 million prison expansion plan Jerry had pushed through ballooned to $3 billion under his successor. The era of “tough on crime” legislation, Three Strikes, and the emphasis on punishment, not rehabilitation, ushered in the cycle of high recidivism that Jerry discovered many years later on the streets of Oakland.

  Even with almost triple the number of prisons, conditions deteriorated rapidly in California’s thirty-four facilities. Double bunking became common, then three prisoners were put in cells designed for one. Healthcare was so inadequate that inmates were dying at the rate of one a week. A series of lawsuits forced the state to forfeit unprecedented control: A special federal master was put in charge of mental health programs, and a federal judge took over the healthcare system. In 2006, the prison population peaked at 173,000. In a fight that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, judges ordered California to limit the number of inmates to 137.5 percent of the capacity of the prisons. When Jerry took office, that translated to thirty thousand fewer prisoners.

  In his first budget, Jerry proposed what became known as Realignment Two: California shifted responsibility for most lower-level felons to the county jails and probation departments. The goals were to save money, comply with court orders, and reduce recidivism rates. The theory was that counties could make more intelligent, informed decisions about what combination of treatment and punishment would most likely rehabilitate offenders and keep them from committing further crimes. Instead of being placed on parole, low-level felons released from prison would be supervised by local probation officers, who would determine sanctions for any violations. Only those charged with serious crimes would be returned to state prison. In addition, offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes with no record of serious or sexual crimes would serve time in county jail instead of state prison.

  The state prison population dropped dramatically after realignment, but not enough to comply with the court orders. As popular opinion shifted away from the punitive sentiment of the “get tough” years, Jerry campaigned for two propositions that further eased prison overcrowding. The first reduced penalties for many nonviolent drug and property crimes to misdemeanors. The second restored greater discretion in sentencing to judges and parole boards and allowed inmates to accumulate credits that could speed up their release. “This is a very interesting topic, a very important topic, that touches safety, fear, religion,11 forgiveness, redemption, the whole definition of who we are as a civilization,” Jerry said as he campaigned for the second proposition.

  Both passed, as did a softening of the Three Strikes law. By the end of 2015, the state’s incarceration rate had fallen 30 percent from its peak, to the lowest level since the early 1990s. “I’ve been able to create problems that I then later was able to solve,” Jerry said. “That’s a very good feeling.” Or, as he said in his typical candid fashion at a San Diego forum to encourage businesses to hire ex-felons: “I helped screw things up,12 but I helped unscrew things.”

  Studies in the years after realignment suggested that the sweeping changes had little if any immediate impact on overall crime rates in California, which continued at historic lows. The impact on recidivism was murkier and would take longer to unravel, as counties adjusted to new responsibilities. Initial studies suggested counties that placed more emphasis on programs geared to help ex-felons reenter society had significantly lower rearrest and conviction rates.

  A young Jerry Brown had complained about money wasted on prison mental health programs where inmates took part in “group gab sessions about what your mother did or didn’t do to you.” He had praised tough sentencing laws as “based not on sociology or Freudian theory but on simple justice.” An older Jerry Brown invoked his father’s core view of government and its power to be a force for good. “We always were told to pray for the souls in purgatory,”13 he said at a Black Legislative Caucus event on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2017, echoing one of his father’s favorite sentiments. “My father would think about, who’s the most forgotten soul in California? Who is that person? I want to make sure I’m there to help. And I can tell you that many of the people behind bars today are forgotten.”

  Jerry spent hours reviewing and debating applications for clemency and commutations. He granted a record number of pardons, which restored rights to ex-felons. As he neared the end of his tenure, Jerry had issued 1,115 pardons and 51 commutations since taking office again in 2011, far more than any other governor in modern times. As governor the first time around, he issued 404 pardons and one commutation. “We all do bad things. A little humility14 in the face of people who have done bad things is called for,” he said. “People who commit crimes can change. Some people change right away, some people don’t change for five years. Some people, it takes them forty years.”

  Jerry’s interest in correcting his own youthful missteps that affected the criminal justice system extended to judicial appointments. He had a second chance to reshape a powerful institution that had suffered when his attempts the first time backfired: the California Supreme Court.

  “I’m the only governor who appointed judges that were unelected,” he said at his fiftieth Yale Law School reunion. He had chosen them, he said, because as a clerk to Justice Mathew Tobriner, Jerry found the Supreme Court dull, not “yeasty” enough,15 one of his favorite words. “There was too much inertia. I wanted a little more dynamism. I thought, at least in 1964 when I was there, that there should have been more activism. So I looked for some judges who would shake thing up a bit.” But when Rose Bird, Joe Grodin, and Cruz Reynoso were thrown off the court, their replacements ushered in decades of conservative decisions. “So I guess that says that you do have to maintain a certain range. And if you get outside tha
t range in a system that has elections, then you may create the exact opposite of where you were going.”

  Three vacancies during Jerry’s first term gave him an opportunity to rebuild the state’s highest court a second time. He chose a group diverse in their ethnicity if not their pedigree; all three were young Yale Law School graduates, the first two having already established reputations as legal intellectuals—Goodwin Liu, Mariano Florentino Cuellar, and Leondra Kruger. Jerry urged his appointees to read the work of Grant Gilmore, who argued that judges should revise statutes in accordance with historic developments. Jerry wanted the court to return to its preeminent position during the Earl Warren and Pat Brown years, when pioneering decisions on issues such as abortion rights and free speech at shopping malls granted Californians protections rooted in the state constitution and the political culture of the West.

  California’s oldest governor also had a second chance to influence the state’s fiscal policy through a popular referendum. His effort to avert Proposition 13 during his first term by supporting an alternative tax cut proposition had come only as a last-minute attempt to defeat the Jarvis measure—too little, too late. Three decades later, ballot box budgeting had become common, along with the practice of building up large funds to spend on initiative campaigns.

  As he wrestled to balance state finances, Jerry had a major advantage over his predecessors: The year he was elected, voters approved a proposition that allowed the legislature to pass budgets with a simple majority, undoing the two-thirds requirement that had been written into the 1879 constitution. Polls showed that frustration with Sacramento gridlock had become so extreme that even Republicans supported the change, although it meant their party would lose much of its leverage, since Democrats could easily muster a majority vote.