Judge’s Last-Chance Demand

California’s prison system is a much tougher nut to crack than it was in 1940, when Clinton Duffy took over San Quentin as warden. Duffy transformed the state’s oldest prison -- a row of dungeons by San Francisco Bay where often-naked inmates were thrown rotten food from buckets after being beaten -- into a genuine correctional institution. His then-revolutionary reforms included having prisoners earn their keep by working behind bars and studying trades to ply after their release. Three years later, Earl Warren took office as governor and spread reforms to other state prisons. They eventually became the national model for prison-based rehabilitation.

Today, California’s prison system again does not rehabilitate. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature are either unable or unwilling to get at the root of this failure. Instead of a new warden, a federal judge may end up in charge.

In a letter to the governor Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who has been investigating the state’s prisons for years, angrily stated that the latest contract revisions, approved by Schwarzenegger, essentially “transfer management authority to the union” and embolden the guards’ “code of silence” that thwarts discipline.

Henderson, obviously at the end of his rope, threatened to take control of the entire system. The judge could then appoint a new director of corrections with authority to, among other things, hire and fire wardens and rewrite the guards’ contract. That may be the only way to force change in the prisons, the state’s elected officials having failed so thoroughly.

State politicians have in the last decade capitulated to nearly everything the politically powerful prison guards union has demanded. The guards’ pay raises over three years are many times those of other state employees, they have nearly unmonitored sick time, and senior officers control their own assignments. For instance, a senior guard seeking a cushy spot may choose to be prison education coordinator, even if he has no qualification or desire to educate.

Over several years, the union has killed the community- and prison-based educational, job and counseling programs that in other states keep inmates from returning to prison. The union also funds politicians it likes and mounts costly campaigns against those it doesn’t.

Henderson began investigating abuses in the state’s prisons 14 years ago, the result of a lawsuit over guards’ brutal beatings of inmates at Pelican Bay, a maximum-security prison in Northern California. He seems to recognize something Duffy saw more than 60 years ago at San Quentin: Guards’ brutality is a canary in a coal mine, the indication of a larger problem. Henderson’s threat should break loose some action by Schwarzenegger and the equally culpable Legislature. If it doesn’t happen fast, let Henderson give it a try.