Articles & News

March 18, 2008

Judge 'in it for long haul' on prison reform

Bob Egelko, SF Chronicle Staff Writer

The federal judge at the center of the controversy over prison conditions in California said Saturday that judicial pressure is needed to persuade officials to respect inmates' constitutional rights.

"Correctional defendants are particularly resistant to courts ordering change," U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco said at a conference on penal reform at the University of San Francisco. "Prison personnel can be experts at the waiting game.

"I'm not going away. I'm here for the long haul."

At the same time, the veteran jurist said, he'd rather work with state officials on solutions to prison overcrowding and inadequate health care than impose his own remedies.

Henderson ruled in 2006 that the $1.1 billion medical care system in California's 33 prisons was "broken beyond repair," with one unnecessary death per week, and violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. He transferred control of prison health care from state officials to a manager under his supervision.

He is also one member of a three-judge federal panel considering whether prison overcrowding, with 169,000 inmates in a system designed for half that many, is preventing improvements in health care and mental health treatment. If so, the panel can limit the prison population, which would require inmate releases or changes in sentencing policies.

In hopes of avoiding such an order, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature approved a $7.4 billion bond measure last April to provide 53,000 new prison and county jail beds and to increase funding for rehabilitation and drug treatment. Schwarzenegger has also begun transferring up to 8,000 inmates to prisons in other states, and has proposed the early release of 22,000 prisoners.

Some participants in Saturday's conference, including the leader of the state's prison guards union, called the state's approach inadequate and misguided.

"Every dollar that's spent building a prison bed is a dollar that isn't spent on a child," said Michael Jimenez, president of the 30,000-member California Correctional Peace Officers Association. "I don't believe this is a step toward reform at all."

Last year's measure was "a miserable piece of legislation," said Michael Jacobson, a former New York City corrections commissioner who heads the Vera Institute, a nonprofit that favors reducing prison populations. He said California has badly underestimated construction costs, will not reduce overcrowding even if it carries out its plans, and could increase public safety at far less cost by investing in local rehabilitation programs.

But Joyce Hayhoe, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger on prison issues, said the critics misunderstood the measure. She said some of the new prison beds would replace substandard inmate quarters in gymnasiums and day rooms, and other funds would expand re-entry programs to provide job training for prisoners about to be released.

Henderson, a 1980 judicial appointee of President Jimmy Carter, told conferees that judges in prison cases must seek the proper balance between two obligations - the need to protect the constitutional rights of a population with little political or public support, and the duty to let prison officials manage their institutions with minimal interference.

But he said courts should not give "undue deference to those who have created the unconstitutional conditions." Henderson said he prefers to prod officials into solving the problems themselves, with input from lawyers representing the prisoners, but is willing to play an active role, setting deadlines, threatening to hold violators in contempt of court and appointing overseers to make changes if necessary.

That approach, he said, has improved conditions at the maximum-security Pelican Bay State Prison in Del Norte County, the target of a 1995 Henderson ruling that found constitutional violations in medical care, psychiatric treatment and use of force by prison guards.

With the help of the governor's office and state legislators, he said, "we will make California a national model for prison health care."

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle