California is carrying the weight of decades-old public safety woes into the new year.

Not that the state is becoming a more dangerous place. To the contrary, crime rates across nearly all major categories and in almost every region are retreating, as they have for several years.

Many of the concerns are financial conundrums - how Californians adjust to getting less than they're accustomed to from their criminal justice systems. The state will probably house fewer prisoners and find itself protected by smaller local police forces.

The U.S. Supreme Court will rule on whether the state must dramatically reduce its prison population. With an estimated $28 billion budget shortfall, the legal and law enforcement communities will endure further spending cuts.

Then there are the long-nagging questions that, with a new (or refurbished?) governor taking office, might finally get answers. For one, does California send too many people to its overwhelmed prisons because too many crimes are deemed serious felonies? Does state sentencing policy undercut efforts at rehabilitation? And what about this miserable recidivism rate?

Countless other issues are in play as well.

Will California finally prove to the courts that it can competently and constitutionally execute condemned prisoners? Will lawmakers extend higher vehicle license fees that police and prosecutors now rely on for cash?

Of course, state and local leaders will defer some of the larger questions and painful solutions to future years. But squeezed between the financial crisis and irreversible federal court action, California has less room to maneuver, making 2011 a year of great consequence for public safety.

Without further introduction, here is a California Watch primer on the big items to come.

Prison overcrowding

The federal courts have deemed health care in California's prisons unconstitutionally substandard, in large part because there are roughly 150,000 prisoners in facilities built to house 83,000.

The currently prescribed remedy is to reduce the prison population by some 20,000 to 30,000 inmates. This would not necessarily come through an early release program. However, the alternatives are either expensive (sending prisoners to private facilities) or a kind of delayed early release (transferring low-level offenders to ill-equipped county jails).

Talk of such action inspires fears that violent felons would be among those released, spurring theoretical crime waves and public outrage against the officials responsible.

How the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation undertakes this hugely complicated endeavor is critical. Because the Supreme Court appears likely to uphold the lower court ruling, requiring a smaller prison population. As Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the high court's swing vote, said during oral arguments [PDF] in the case, "overcrowding is the principal cause, as experts have testified, and it's now time for a remedy."

Sentencing laws

The overcrowded prisons are arguably tied directly with this issue, judges sentencing non-violent offenders to long prison terms.

Over the past 30 years, state lawmakers have introduced legislation nine times to create a sentencing commission that would analyze sentencing and crime data and set what punishment best fit the offenses, Kara Dansky, executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, wrote in the Federal Sentencing Reporter [PDF] last year. That commission would install "indeterminate" sentencing, which takes away the wide discretion judges now wield with "determinate" sentencing.

None of those efforts succeeded, including one endorsed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger three years ago.

"Proposals to create a sentencing commission in California have met with strong opposition, often based on the mistaken view that sentencing commissions are wolves in sheep's clothing - nefarious attempts on the part of prison abolitionists to release dangerous criminals from prison," Dansky wrote.

Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, echoed that skeptical viewpoint in 2009, the last time legislation for a commission came up. "It's rewriting sentencing laws we fought 20 years to achieve," Blakeslee told The Sacramento Bee.

The political odds of creating a sentencing commission might be no better in 2011.

But the proposal could have one key supporter in California's incoming governor, Jerry Brown.

"We never should have gotten rid of indeterminate sentencing - we lost the ability to rehabilitate offenders," Brown said in 2003, as quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle. "Now, each year we release thousands of parolees who are angry and absolutely unprepared to function in society."

Vehicle license fees

Without state lawmakers' intervention, on June 31, California's vehicle license fees fall by 77 percent.

Good news for motorists who pay the tab, but the fee decrease would cost the state's local police departments $70 million in revenue for "front line enforcement," according to data from the California Local Government Finance Almanac [PDF]. Juvenile justice agencies' budgets would shrink by $88 million and prosecutors' offices would lose millions more.

Lawmakers increased the fee in 2009 to help local governments deal with the financial crisis. The law enforcement community is pushing to make that increase permanent.

Capital punishment

This might be the year California resumes executions.

The state corrections department has secured the pharmaceuticals needed for its three-drug lethal injection cocktail. It built a shining new death chamber, with the space for all involved to do their jobs. Officials have written and rewritten policies and procedures, training its personnel for every step.

Nevertheless, will it be enough to prove California can kill its condemned prisoners in a constitutional manner?

That question is headed back to a number of different state and federal courts, which have placed an injunction blocking executions at San Quentin State Prison. It has been nearly five years since the state executed an inmate; 713 prisoners sit on death row.

The most pressing issue now is that corrections officials refuse to name the British supplier that sold it 521 grams of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic and the first lethal injection drug administered of the combo.

Under court order, following a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, the state agency released more than 1,000 pages of emails describing drug transactions. However, the corrections department redacted the names of anyone outside the agency.

On Jan. 6, the corrections department must either disclose the now-redacted information, or provide the judge a more complete explanation for why it should continue to withhold it.