Think you’re not getting your money’s worth from Sacramento? The San Francisco Chronicle reports that … you’re right!

State prison officials, as they grappled last year with the largest deficit in the agency’s history, allowed a private foundation that provides drug treatment to inmates to spend nearly $500,000 of taxpayer money to create a movie studio.

The money was earmarked for substance abuse programs but instead was used to buy everything from two high-tech cameras to two 50-inch plasma-screen televisions. It was spent in the same fiscal year that the state’s prison system racked up a $543 million deficit.

… The Amity Foundation, based in Porterville (Tulare County), has contracts to run treatment programs in five prisons. Nearing the end of the fiscal year, the foundation hadn’t spent some of the $3.75 million it takes in annually through the contracts.

Instead of returning the money to the state’s general fund, the foundation spent about $480,000 buying equipment.

Department of Corrections officials defended the spending as “appropriate.”

The foundation used the equipment to produce a 3-1/2 hour training video featuring “a lecture from a renowned drug treatment expert.” Amity contends that this was intended to cut travel costs for counselor training. How about sending them a book instead?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 11:43 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.