Devoted to Legal, Community Causes : Isaac Pacht; Led Prison Reform

Isaac Pacht, who arrived in this country as a boy of 6, has died 90 years later after a life devoted to legal and community causes.

Pacht, who died Saturday night at his West Los Angeles home, was a former Superior Court and Appellate Court judge and a prime mover of prison reform legislation in California.

The seventh son of an Austrian-Hungarian family who emigrated to New York in 1896, Pacht by age 12 was working during the day so he could attend school at night.

He graduated from the old Brooklyn Law School but was too young to take the New York Bar examination, so he moved to California, where he spent a few years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner.

He was admitted to the California State Bar in 1913 and developed a successful private practice before being appointed to the Los Angeles Superior Court bench by Gov. James Rolph in 1931.

His son, Jerry, himself a judge, said his father quit the bench in 1936 because he could no longer support his family on the reduced judicial salaries brought on by the Depression.

The elder Pacht returned to private practice and became a trustee of both the Los Angeles County and the Beverly Hills bar associations.

Plan for Chino

In 1940 he was appointed by Gov. Culbert L. Olson to the state Board of Prison Directors and that same year, as board chairman, appointed the colorful penologist Clinton Duffy as warden of San Quentin.

Pacht also was the first to envision a minimum-security prison facility that became a reality at Chino. Under Olson’s successor, Gov. Earl Warren, Pacht was named to a commission that revised the state Penal Code and criminal justice system in the late 1940s.

Over the years Pacht--whose clients included many film stars--served on a variety of community organizations, primarily as president of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Council, the umbrella group for most Jewish organizations in the area. He also headed the highly successful Vista del Mar Child Care Service in Palms, which helps orphans or children from troubled families, and was chairman of the Community Relations Committee, an organization that serves as a liaison between Jewish and Gentile groups.

Of all his father’s honors, Jerry Pacht said, he was was proudest of having a chair of law named for him at Hebrew University in Israel and for receiving the Golda Meir Medal for service to the state of Israel.

Isaac Pacht also was among the first to be interested in what was then called the Sanitorium at Duarte--now the City of Hope.

With Claude Hudson he founded the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

And, said Jerry Pacht, he was one of the first to join and participate in Sierra Club expeditions.

“He came back from a hike in 1929 with some pictures he had purchased from a young man he had met on a Sierra outing in Northern California. A young photographer named Ansel Adams.”

In addition to Jerry Pacht, he is survived by another son, Rudolph, 10 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.