Officials Feel Heat Over Prison Report

A scathing report about California’s troubled prison system increased pressure Friday on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to press ahead with sweeping changes in the $5.3-billion program.

Schwarzenegger’s chief spokesman Rob Stutzman said in Los Angeles that the governor is “very concerned by what the federal master has reported.”

In a 78-page draft document prepared for a federal judge in San Francisco, Special Master John Hagar found that top officials in the Department of Corrections, under pressure from the powerful prison guards union, have been unwilling to discipline officers involved in attacks on inmates or other misconduct.

Stutzman said Schwarzenegger has “the utmost confidence” that Roderick Q. Hickman, his new secretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, will “restore order to the department and that agency.”

Tip Kindel, the agency’s assistant secretary, said the new administration is “developing a comprehensive program so that we have an investigations process ... that will have integrity and will be credible, thorough and fair.”

Kindel said Hickman has met with the special master and made a “personal commitment” that investigations will be free of inappropriate outside influences.

“The secretary is committed to restoring public and employee confidence in the discipline process,” Kindel said.

But it will take more than statements of confidence to satisfy key Democrats who are planning two days of hearings starting Tuesday on investigations of misconduct in California’s prisons.

State Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Government Oversight, said she has “never read such a hard-hitting indictment of a department in all my years in public service.”

Speier said the state has “to bring that system under control” or risk seeing a federal judge take over supervision. “We have to restore strong leadership so that correctional officers who want to do the right thing will not fear for their lives.”

The lawmaker said she received a call Wednesday from “a big, burly man” -- Max Lemon, the associate warden of Folsom Prison -- asking for protection because he had “broken the code of silence” about a riot at the prison in April 2002. Lemon is to testify before the Senate committee Tuesday in Sacramento.

Speier said the special master’s report should set off an alarm in the Capitol about the need to change the prison system. “This culture has to be turned around,” she said.

Both Speier and Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of a Senate select committee on California’s prison system. said the Schwarzenegger administration’s recent proposal to eliminate the Office of Inspector General and transfer its oversight duties to the agency secretary is the wrong way to go.

“The worst message to send is: ‘Let’s get rid of an independent inspector general,’ ” Romero said.

She said the idea should be “dead on arrival” in the Legislature.

Speier said she and Romero hope their hearings will help “develop a blueprint to restore integrity to the Department of Corrections.”

Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., said Hagar’s report came like a “sucker punch.”

“What the special master has done is take bits and pieces of ongoing cases and tried to issue a report regarding alleged abuses in California prisons,” Corcoran said.

He suggested that Hagar has been unduly influenced by the Prison Law Office, a group of lawyers who have challenged the operation of Pelican Bay.

“We fully support good investigations. We’re thankful for them. Good investigators follow the rules,” Corcoran said.

But too often, he said, internal affairs officers fail to follow proper rules.

What’s more, he said, the union prevails in its defense of officers because some internal affairs officers are lazy.

“They are too arrogant to admit they are wrong, so it had to be the big bad correctional peace officers union that stopped them,” Corcoran said.

Republican Sen. Bruce McPherson of Santa Cruz, a member of the committee that will hold the hearings, said the special master’s findings were “particularly troublesome,” especially after legislative hearings several years ago into some of the same Department of Corrections and Pelican Bay issues.

Asked if the Legislature could be expected to enact substantial reforms if the politically influential prison guards union were found to be at least partly to blame, McPherson avoided a direct answer.

But he said, “I know the [union] is a powerful organization in state government, but we’ve just got to look at what is right and wrong and make our decisions accordingly.”

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Times staff writers Carl Ingram and Joe Mathews contributed to this report.