California's Crisis In Prison Systems A Threat to Public

Prisons expanded to accommodate the influx. Now, a person driving along Interstate 5 from Mexico to Oregon is never more than an hour from a California prison. Pilots can even navigate by the facilities' locations.

As the prison population grew and rehabilitation stopped, the Department of Corrections turned into an organization with "no other pretensions but human warehousing," said Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Zimring and others say the Department of Corrections effectively ceded its managerial role to the state's correctional officers union. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association today has 31,000 members and one of the wealthiest political action committees in the state.

From the beginning, the union has been adept at cultivating backers in both parties. Union backing and millions in donations played a key role in the elections of two governors: nearly $1 million to help elect Republican Pete Wilson in 1990, and, eight years later, $2 million to Democrat Gray Davis. Both governors awarded corrections officers large raises.

For the past three years, under a contract negotiated by Davis, California's correctional officers, already the highest-paid in the nation, have been averaging increases of more than 10 percent a year; more than 2,000 of their members make more than $100,000 a year. Their contract grants them better pension benefits than professors from the state university system.

But more than salaries, the contract gives the union the right to reject policy changes. And, the union, not management, determines who fills more than 70 percent of the positions at a given prison.

In almost every way the union seems to have the state administration outgunned. "We sit down to the negotiating table, and we use our laptops. We all have one program," said Joe Bauman, a correctional officer in Norco and a union negotiator. "Meanwhile, they're using a calculator that you get free with a carton of cigarettes."

When he came into office on the back of an unprecedented recall of Davis in 2003, Schwarzenegger vowed to take on the union and bring California's prison system into the modern world. On his second day in office, he appointed Ronald Hickman, a barrel-chested former prison guard with a reputation as a reformer, to lead the department. "Corrections," Schwarzenegger said, "should correct."

Last year, Hickman reorganized the state's prison network and returned the word "rehabilitation" to the title of his agency for the first time since 1980. Schwarzenegger and Hickman subsequently announced a new parole program that they said would cut the prison population by an estimated 15,000 and vowed more changes.

But the parole plan bombed because it was poorly planned and badly executed and the prison officers unions fought it all the way, Hickman said in a recent interview. "We really didn't do a very good job on implementation."

For his part, Hickman quit in February after discovering that Schwarzenegger's top aides had been meeting with union representatives behind his back.

Hickman was replaced by Jeanne Woodford, the former warden of San Quentin. But at the end of April, she also resigned after Schwarzenegger administration officials allowed the union to veto one of her picks for a warden.