Davis to Retain Chief of Corrections Dept.

Gov. Gray Davis announced Tuesday that he is retaining state Department of Corrections Director Cal Terhune, who has initiated steps in the last 19 months to turn around California’s troubled prison system.

By selecting Terhune, Davis is keeping a veteran official who launched a series of reforms last year prompted by Times reports examining the prison system, including how the state had failed to adequately scrutinize fatal and other serious shootings at Corcoran State Prison.

In an interview Tuesday, Terhune said his top priority is to ensure that all 33 state prisons follow a newly revised policy against shooting inmates engaged in nonlethal altercations.

The reappointment “looks like an opportunity to deal with some of the issues that have troubled the department,” said Terhune, who is launching a new program to train thousands of officers in the updated use of force policy.

The revised policy says that unless an officer is “absolutely sure that an inmate is about to take the life of another inmate or staff member, you don’t use deadly force,” Terhune said.

At 69, the ruddy-faced Terhune is a tough-minded state bureaucrat who moves easily between the world behind bars to the corridors of power in the Capitol, chatting one day with heavily tattooed inmates and testifying the next to the Legislature.

A graduate of San Jose State, Terhune also holds a master’s degree from UC Berkeley. He came up through the ranks of law enforcement, serving in various posts in the California Youth Authority. In 1987, he was appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian as director of the youth authority. He later retired.

In 1997, Gov. Pete Wilson brought him out of retirement to run the $4- billion-a-year Department of Corrections, which has 45,000 employees, including 28,000 officers, and 160,000 inmates.

Terhune has won praise from lawmakers for his straightforward approach to running the nation’s largest prison system.

Hailing Terhune’s integrity, state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) said Tuesday: “He’s committed to having a humane, smart system that incarcerates those who should be incarcerated but doesn’t brutalize them in the process.”

But Steve Fama, an attorney with the Prison Law Office, which has tangled with the department, described Terhune’s record as mixed.

“On the positive side, he did finally make the long overdue changes in the deadly force policy,” Fama said.

But he criticized Terhune for agreeing to have the state pay for the legal defense of eight guards charged by a federal grand jury with wrongdoing at Corcoran. “I think that might be emblematic of a focus that is too concerned with the interests and desires of the correctional officers union as opposed to what’s best for the state as a whole,” Fama said.

Fama said he would have preferred that Davis look outside the department and even outside California for a fresh face. “The department needs a new perspective,” he said.

Terhune, who considers himself something of an outsider, having spent most of his career with juveniles, lives in Ione, a small town southeast of Sacramento and home to Mule Creek State Prison.

He said it’s not uncommon for wives of prisoners or parolees to search out his home and knock on his door to complain about the treatment the department has meted out to their loved ones.

On Wednesday, Davis also named Gregori S. Zermeno as director of the California Youth Authority, replacing Francisco Alarcon. Zermeno, 52, of Elk Grove, has served as a superintendent of the DeWitt Nelson Correctional Facility in Stockton since 1996.

Like the Department of Corrections, the youth authority has been plagued by problems. A recent investigation by the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency’s inspector general, for example, found a 20-year pattern of mismanagement in sexual misconduct cases at the Ventura School, which is run by the youth authority.

Both Terhune and Zermeno will receive $105,883 annually.

Davis made a third related appointment. He chose Stephen W. White, 49, former district attorney of Sacramento County, as the new inspector general charged with looking into complaints against the Corrections Department and the youth authority. White, who replaces Lloyd Wood, will be paid $101,211 a year.