Budget Ax May End Prisons’ Favored Status : Corrections: Governor and lawmakers look for cuts that will cause a minimum of political backlash. But most options would stir up strong oppostion.

After more than 10 years of phenomenal growth, the state prison system is facing the budgetary ax.

Gov. Pete Wilson and legislative leaders, struggling with a budget gap of about $10.7 billion, are studying the Department of Corrections’ $2.3-billion budget, looking for places to cut that will cause a minimum of political backlash.

Critics of Department of Corrections policies have contended for the last 10 years that the state cannot afford its massive prison construction program.

“The chickens have come home to roost,” said Jim Austin, executive vice president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a penology research organization in San Francisco. “California’s imprisonment binge is over.”

Department of Corrections officials, under a gag order from Wilson, refuse to disclose contingency plans for reducing their budget, but lists of options for cuts are circulating in the Capitol.

The problem is that most of these options--no one will call them recommendations--would set off firestorms of controversy.

A list compiled by the legislative analyst’s office, for example, includes the option of eliminating all parole and supervision of ex-convicts for an annual saving of $118 million. It is not likely that the 1,642 state parole agents would leave their jobs quietly or that the public would accept such a change in public safety policy.

The legislative analyst’s list also includes the option of releasing inmates from prison four months before the end of their sentences. That would save an estimated $45 million, but early release of prisoners is considered a political poison pill by both the Legislature and the governor.

A list put together by Geoffrey Long, principal consultant of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, contains the option of eliminating all educational services for inmates for a saving of $90 million.

Long’s list also includes doing away with all religious, art and athletic programs in prison for an annual saving of $20 million, a measure that would certainly inflame the clergy as well as prisoner-rights groups.

The list contains the option of closing a prison and further crowding others to save $15 million--a step that might please proponents of harsh treatment but would certainly result in lawsuits filed by prisoner-rights organizations.

Both lists include an option that may well be adopted--delaying the openings of new prisons at Delano and Lancaster for a saving of $60 million to $65 million in operating costs. The opening of the Delano prison already has been delayed eight months because of last year’s budget crisis. About $30 million needed to operate the nearly completed Lancaster facility was cut from a working version of the state budget last month by the Assembly Ways and Means Committee.

Advisers to the governor and legislators say that to reduce the cost of prisons, the flow of incoming convicts must be slowed. The legislative analyst’s office estimated, for example, that $37 million could be saved by limiting prison admissions to convicts who have at least four months to serve.

The potential cuts come after a decade of unprecedented state prison growth.

Corrections officials have undertaken the largest penitentiary construction program in the history of the country. The prison system has grown from 12 facilities in 1982 to 25 this year. Besides the construction of 13 prisons, seven existing penitentiaries were greatly expanded. Some of the “expansions”--such as the one next to the old Folsom State Prison--are in effect new penitentiaries that share wardens and facilities such as kitchens with the old prisons on the sites. Six more prisons are either in the construction or planning stages.

The price tag for the construction program is $3.8 billion so far, and corrections officials envision the building of another six prisons--which have not been fully funded--by the end of the decade. But in November, 1990, voters rejected $450 million in prison construction bonds.

The cost of operating the prisons once they are built comes out of the general fund and amounts to about $20,000 per inmate per year.

The Department of Corrections budget, most of which goes to operating its prisons, has outstripped all other state departments in its rate of growth. The corrections budget ballooned from $331 million in 1979-80 to $2.3 billion last year.

Ironically, the more prisons that were built, the more crowded they became as state legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, vied with one another to pass tougher and tougher anti-crime bills to lock up more people for longer periods.

In 1982, the state prisons were designed to hold 25,593 inmates but were holding 34,681. By the end of 1990, the prison system had been expanded to hold 52,698 inmates, but 97,309 were jammed into the cells.

Prison guards have grown in number and power along with the expansion of the penitentiary system.

In 1982, there were an estimated 6,300 correctional officers working in the state prisons. By the end of 1990, there were 20,000. Total staff for the Department of Corrections also increased threefold from 10,000 in 1982 to 30,000 by the end of 1990.

California pays its prison guards well. A beginning correctional officer needs only a high school diploma to be eligible to take a test for the job and, after six weeks of training, receives $29,436 a year to start. Top salary for a guard is $42,552 per year.

Only Alaska prisons offer comparable wages. Nationwide, the average beginning salary for prison guards, after training, is $18,632 a year with an average yearly maximum wage of $28,074, according to 1990 figures published by the Criminal Justice Institute.

Along with their increase in numbers, California’s prison guards have grown in political strength. The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. has become a major player in the Capitol.

Between 1987 and 1991, the group contributed more than $2 million to the campaign funds of California politicians, state records show. Former Gov. George Deukmejian, a conservative Republican, received $494,548, primarily to finance his successful ballot initiative to allow prisoners to work for private firms. The guards’ union spent $748,221 in support of Wilson’s campaign for governor in 1990.

But liberals were also helped by the union in the 1987-91 period. State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) got $82,000 and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) received $63,000.

That kind of largess, in the midst of a multibillion-dollar prison construction program, bothers some observers.

“People need to take a very close look at prison funding in this state,” said Kim Alexander, policy analyst for California Common Cause. “Maybe there is some correlation to the fact that they (the union) are big contributors. . . . I think a lot of lawmakers are afraid to vote against prison measures in the budget crisis because they are afraid of political retribution.”

Responded Jeff Thompson, chief lobbyist for the correctional officers association: “We resent their simplistic overstatement based on some phobia of a political action committee; the insinuation is that somehow we are manipulating policy makers to do the wrong thing. All of our work has been to improve the profession.”

Times staff writer Daniel M. Weintraub contributed to this story.