Some kept in prison too long

SACRAMENTO -- Up to 33,000 prisoners in California may be entitled to release earlier than scheduled because the state has miscalculated their sentences, corrections officials said Wednesday.

For nearly two years, the overburdened state prison agency has failed to recalculate the sentences of those inmates despite a series of court rulings, including one by the California Supreme Court. The judges said the state applied the wrong formula when crediting certain inmates for good behavior behind bars.

Some inmates released in recent months almost certainly stayed longer in prison than they should have, said corrections officials, employees and advocates for prisoners. Some currently in prison most likely should be free, they said. But many whose sentences are too long are not scheduled to be released for months or years.

The inmates in question -- 19% of the state prison population -- are serving consecutive sentences for violent and nonviolent offenses. The sentencing errors range from a few days to several years.

Corrections officials say they have been unable to calculate the sentences properly because of staffing shortages and outdated computer systems that force analysts to do the complex work by hand.

Keeping prisoners institutionalized for too long wastes millions of dollars a year. A preliminary analysis of the problem in August by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation concluded that the longer sentences boost the state’s already swollen prison population by 600 inmates a day, at a cost of nearly $26 million annually.

The state has about 173,000 prisoners and has undertaken the addition of 53,000 more beds because of overcrowding -- a situation that has helped erode the state’s shaky finances.

“This is another function of the overcrowding crisis,” said Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, a Bay Area group that represents inmates in court. “They have to handle the number of prisoners who are in the system. They can’t meet their medical or mental health needs. Now it appears that there is some reason to believe that they can’t even calculate their release dates correctly.”

Specter said prisoners who are kept too long would have grounds to sue the corrections department.

Scott Kernan, the state’s chief deputy secretary for adult prison operations, said the department hopes to hire 85 more analysts to begin working on the problem.

“We believe it’s a problem,” Kernan said. “We’re taking it very seriously in a time of limited resources. . . . We have an obligation to go recalculate their sentences, and we’re going to get the resources and we’re going to do it.”

Corrections officials said they plan to ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration next week for the additional personnel.

The corrections department had been taking 15% off sentences for good behavior -- the standard for violent offenses -- even when part of the term was for a nonviolent crime. But in three decisions in 2005 and 2006, state appeals courts and the state Supreme Court agreed with prisoners that they should have received a 50% credit -- the standard for nonviolent crimes -- on the nonviolent portion of their sentences.

In the most recent case, decided Jan. 12, 2006, the 5th District state Court of Appeal sided with prisoner Breonne Tate, who argued that his release date should have been about 10 months earlier than the state calculated. The judges agreed, and he was paroled Aug. 27, 2006.

Tate had been convicted in Los Angeles County in 2001 of attempted robbery using a firearm, receiving a 4 1/2 -year sentence for a violent felony. In 2003, he received two more years after pleading guilty to possession of a weapon in prison, considered a nonviolent crime.

But after the 5th District decision, corrections officials decided they would not immediately recalculate the sentences of all those eligible, according to prison case records analysts and the labor leaders who represent them in the Service Employees International Union Local 1000.

Instead, administrators instructed that only those prisoners who complained or obtained a court order would receive revised sentences, union officials said.

Kernan said he was not aware that such an instruction had been issued but added, “That would be a reasonable course of action,” given the department’s lack of resources.

The union filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Superior Court in Sacramento against the corrections department, Secretary James Tilton and Schwarzenegger. It accuses them of violating state and federal law by failing to fix the errors. The union called for the hiring of hundreds more case-records analysts.

“The department chronically runs understaffed,” Marc Bautista, a vice president of the union, said Wednesday. “It’s just a lack of leadership.”

In August, Tilton ordered a sampling of the 33,000 prisoners to determine the severity of the problem. The study indicated that although some release dates might be off by only a few days, correcting the sentences would reduce the inmate population by 600 a day.

Kernan said the agency initially requested 67 more analyst positions in the summer of 2006 so the new sentence calculations could be made. But they were denied by Schwarzenegger’s budget officials. H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the Department of Finance, said the corrections agency was told to fill its existing vacancies first and given extra salary allotments.

Meanwhile, analysts say they are working hundreds of hours overtime. The state’s 25-year-old computers cannot analyze the complex sentencing formulas created by a crazy-quilt of laws passed by the Legislature and by voters through the initiative process, and modified by the courts.

Toni Garcia, a case records analyst at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, complained that the governor and the Legislature pass new laws spending billions on reforming the system when prison workers have to share desks and computers, and requests for staff are met with “red tape.”

“They’re going to build all these facilities to help reform,” Garcia said. “It’s all great. But we need to fix the system the way it is now.”

michael.rothfeld@latimes.com