State Prison Reform Hopes in Jeopardy

When California’s chief of corrections quit in frustration a week ago, a provocative question was left hovering in the air: Can anyone fix the state’s dysfunctional prisons?

Will anyone be allowed to?

Reformers were giddy when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed shortly after his 2003 election that he would demand “action, action, action” until the mess in his Department of Corrections was cleaned up. Overcrowding had packed penitentiaries to twice their intended capacity, increasing violence, straining staff and sending costs spiraling out of control.

Inmate medical care had become so poor that a federal receiver was eventually put in charge. And more than half of all convicts released were back in prison within two years.

To champion his agenda, Schwarzenegger picked Roderick Q. Hickman, a former prison guard and warden, as corrections secretary. Though Hickman described himself as a “hook ‘em and book ‘em guy,” he said he believed true public safety was impossible if the state did not do a better job preparing inmates for success on the outside.

For the first time in decades, advocates of reform felt real change was within reach. A popular governor -- a Republican! -- was singing their tune.

But that optimism has dimmed, and inside the department -- now called Corrections and Rehabilitation -- employees exhausted by long hours devoted to charting a new course wonder if their efforts will amount to naught.

Explaining his resignation in an interview with The Times, Hickman said he faced dwindling support in the Legislature and governor’s office for the changes he had launched. California’s “political environment and the power of special interests,” he said, “work against efforts to bring about lasting reform.”

Day to day, Hickman was handcuffed by the power of the correctional officers union, whose labor contract gives its leaders a say in virtually every change that affects the workplace. The union, whose leaders lambasted Hickman from the start, also is a powerful player in the Legislature, capable of killing reform bills.

Some say Hickman threw in the towel because legislators seemed inclined to oppose him in a confirmation hearing this spring. Though he was confirmed once, legislation that restructured the department last year required a new hearing, and a few lawmakers said they were disappointed by the pace of improvements on his watch. Others said Hickman’s mutually hostile relationship with the guards union had become a liability.

Hickman said he believed he could have found the votes to win confirmation. But he said it was unclear whether newcomers to the governor’s inner circle -- including Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy, once a top advisor to former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis -- backed him or his ideas for change.

Kennedy, who began her job Jan. 1, had not yet met with Hickman, though representatives of the guards union had been spotted inside the governor’s office.

Whatever the secretary’s motivation, his departure has prompted some corrections insiders to worry that Schwarzenegger has lost his enthusiasm for turning around the prisons. Among them is Joan Petersilia, a UC Irvine criminologist brought in by Hickman for advice on parole reform and other topics.

She calls the last two years maddening, likening the experience to “that game of red light, green light you play with your kids.”

“You get the green light, and we all forge ahead full steam on a program or idea,” she said. “Then you get the red light from the governor’s office, and we all come to a crashing halt until the next signal is sent.”

One example, she said, was an effort to end supervision of some low-risk parolees after six months instead of the typical two or three years. Petersilia and a team of corrections officials spent months working on the plan, conducting a pilot study in San Diego.

The goal was to identify 15,000 parolees who were doing well in society and appeared to present a low risk of committing new crimes. By releasing them early from parole supervision, the department could reduce caseloads for overworked parole officers and save a substantial amount of money, considering that the state spends $4,500 a year on every parolee.

“Everybody was behind it, and then one day it was over,” Petersilia said. “We were told to stop, because it would be interpreted as letting people off early and it might be ‘messaged’ wrong, in the political sense. We all wasted a lot of time, and I was angry.”

Early last year, officials were directed to create a youth correctional system that would become a national model, one based on therapy and small housing units. Then the governor’s popularity ratings began to fall, and his aides told corrections officials to slow down, recalled one person who had worked on the plan.

The governor’s office “started out very aggressive and then, when his poll numbers began to erode, they kept backing away and backing away,” said the source, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the plan.

Petersilia said such micromanagement would doom any progress in corrections. Unless Schwarzenegger heeded the abrupt Hickman resignation -- and his reasons -- as a “wake-up call,” she said, talented people dedicated to building a better system would find something else to do.

“The governor’s office has to realize that instead of running the show, they need to be supportive of the show, and supportive of whoever they put at the top,” she said.

Last week, the newly appointed acting secretary, Jeanne Woodford, insisted that the governor remained committed to making California “a national leader in corrections and rehabilitation.”

“The departure of one person,” she said at a media briefing, “will not derail the progress we have made.”

Woodford, a former warden of San Quentin who had been the department’s No. 2 person, is considered the leading candidate for the job.

Reggie Wilkinson, chief of corrections in Ohio and a nationally recognized leader in the field, said Schwarzenegger couldn’t pay him enough to take the post, and noted that a “PhD in diplomacy and very broad shoulders” would be minimum requirements for whoever is picked.

Petersilia said that of the handful of highly respected corrections directors nationally, she could not think of one who would come to California.

“Nobody believes you can do your craft here,” she said. “Nobody is going to come to a place where the environment just makes it impossible to do the business of corrections.”

Schwarzenegger said in a statement a week ago that he would continue down “the path toward change.” But with a tough reelection fight before him, he could veer off that route, fearing that political opponents might portray him as soft on crime.

“It feels that way,” said Donald Specter of the Bay Area nonprofit Prison Law Office, which has sued the state over inmate healthcare and other issues. “It feels like he showed up at a few press conferences and said a lot of great things, and then we never heard from him again.”

The governor could have insulated himself from political attack by exploiting a powerful ally he had enlisted to help him push prison reform: former Gov. George Deukmejian. In 2004, Schwarzenegger asked Deukmejian to figure out what plagued Corrections and how best to mend it.

A law-and-order Republican who led a prison building boom during his tenure, Deukmejian concluded that fixing the system would require a new approach, one anchored in better preparing inmates for release.

“This is not about coddling criminals....” Deukmejian said at the time. “This is about protecting the public by ensuring that offenders do not commit a second crime.”

His ideas received a burst of attention. Then they were forgotten.