Catching up on goings on in California

A couple of items caught my eye during the past week or so that I want to comment on.
First, the Governator.
It was reported recently that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (how odd does THAT sound) had admitted to cheating on his wife of 25 years, Maria Shriver. Not only that, but the former action hero, champion bodybuilder and all around renaissance man had fathered a child with that mistress, the couple's former housekeeper. Watching the news out here, it was treated like the biggest story of the year so far. Camera crews were staked out in front of his offices in Santa Monica and his mistress' home in Bakersfield. My question is, why?
What makes this a newsworthy story? It's not as if Arnold being a philandering pig is a new revelation. Allegations of his womanizing first surfaced when he ran to replace Gray Davis in 2002. Back then, his poor wife stood by him, saying "You can either listen to the news reports, or you can listen to me."
And even if he is a former action hero and a former governor, so what? What makes the media think that people actually care about Arnold's wandering eyes? I know that some will say that the public has a right to know if their politicians are cheating louses. It reflects on their character, the argument goes.
It's true that politicians need to understand that once they throw their hat in the political arena, they give up their private lives. They are under the public's microscope, and they need to behave accordingly. But it's not as if Arnold were stealing from the state coffers or selling pardons to murderers or something else egregious. He cheated on his wife and had an out-of-wedlock child. The affair happened almost 15 years ago (the child is 14). Next?
Being in the public eye doesn't mean that EVERY aspect of a politican's life should be open for public inspection. People change over time. Mistakes that happened years ago should be left in the past, unless that mistake has some direct bearing on the person's performance today. End of story.
Next, on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to release as many as 46,000 prisoners to help relieve the state's prison overcrowding. Predictably, conservatives are already screaming about the new crime wave that will result. This is fear-mongering at its worst.
In the first place, it's highly unlikely that we will see all these prisoners freed and allowed to run the streets. Gov. Jerry Brown already has a plan in place to transfer the majority of them to local jails, assuming Sacramento funds the plan.
And we're not talking about letting out rapists and murderers. We're talking about letting out "minor" offenders, those serving time for drug possession and the like.
It seems to me that now is the time to renew our focus on rehabilitation programs. Sure prison is supposed to be about punishment. Being in prison shouldn't be equivalent to staying at Club Med. But prison also is supposed to be about rehabilitation, about taking people whose lives have gotten off track and giving them a second chance to be productive.
Fact is, the majority of the 142,000 inmates in California will one day be released back into society. It makes no sense, then, not to prepare them for that transition. It makes no sense to make sure they don't have at least a basic education and a chance to train in a skill.
If the "bleeding heart" argument doesn't move you, how about this one? Investing in rehabilitation programs could save the state up to half a billion dollars annually.
Cleaning out the prisons of minor offenders creates room for those who are real threats to society. That would allow lawmakers to do away with failed "three strikes" laws and instead pass a "truth in sentencing" law. People who have proven themselves to be sociopaths -- serial rapists, murderers and child molestors -- should be kept in prison until they no longer represent a threat, or until they are dead. Let's pass a law that says "life in prison" means exactly that. Let's make sure that a rapist sentenced to 25 years serves every day of that sentence. Let's do away with the silly idea of "time off for good behavior." Maybe then, if we make sentences mean what they say, criminals might think twice before threatening our social order.