California Gov. Gray Davis isn't making any friends in the media. An editorial in today's Los Angeles Times takes Davis to task over his pandering to the prison guards union.

State agencies and employees are sharing the pain of Gov. Gray Davis' attempt to reduce a numbing $17-billion deficit. No, wait. That doesn't include prison guards. In his new budget Davis not only spares them from belt-tightening, he hikes their pay 33.76% over the next five years. This shower of riches came four years after the guards union helped raise $2.3 million for Davis' first gubernatorial campaign and not long before the guards contributed $251,000 to his reelection. It will boost the guards' average base salary to about $65,000 a year, before overtime, from about $50,000.

There is nothing wrong with paying prison guards well. But proportion matters. Compare that figure to the $47,000 average yearly salary for the state's credentialed public school teachers, who must have a college degree and a year of postgraduate training. Or the pitiful $25,000 or so for a preschool teacher. Correctional officers, unlike even most police officers, need only a high school diploma and four months of training. Ebullient lobbyists for the guards say the raise will "conservatively" cost the state at least half a billion dollars annually by 2006.

At least the guards are getting the government they've paid for. Good government sure does cost a lot though. If prison guards are going to be paid $65,000 a year, then the state needs to start with higher standards. I think the prison guards should at least be required to have an AA degree. Hopefully that would help weed out some of the bad guards like those at Corcoran State Prison who set prisoners against each other in the equivalent of cockfights.

I've been saying that the whole thing stinks. Whether or not there was a quid pro quo.

Private prisons, first opened by Gov. George Deukmejian in the late 1980s to house minimum-security inmates at lower cost, are not perfect. But they have done well in recent state audits for their job training and community service programs. One is at the 288-bed Baker Community Correctional Facility off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where inmates trained in basic rescue skills provide fire department emergency staffing for a desolate, accident-plagued stretch of the highway.

With record budget deficits threatening the state, there is growing evidence that private prisons, for some uses, are cost-effective. How can politicians ignore this alternative? The answer remains what it has been for years: Follow the political clout and the campaign money.

Well, now the LA Times and I think it stinks. Hopefully the smell will spread.