Prisons Chief Defends Crowding

California prison officials on Tuesday defended their decision to declare a state of emergency last month and begin triple-bunking inmates in crowded gyms and dorms, without telling the public or the Legislature.

“This is rarely used, but it is standard operating procedure,” said Jeanne Woodford, director of the California Department of Corrections. She said an emergency was declared so prison officials could move quickly to solve an unexpected overcrowding problem.

The move led to a ratcheting up of what has become a common practice in the state prison system: pulling lower security inmates out of two-person cells and less crowded dorms and housing them in crammed gymnasiums and dorms on triple bunks.

The April 1 decision peeved lawmakers because they were told about it only last week. The declaration temporarily suspends a requirement to give inmates three days’ notice before moving them.

Department officials said they made the move to deal with an unexpected influx of prisoners from county jails.

The triple-bunking can leave as few as three prison guards looking after a room of 300 inmates -- 100 more than normal, according to Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.

Lawmakers wanted to know why prison officials needed to take such emergency action to make room for hundreds of unexpected prisoners at a time when corrections officials had projected that the inmate population would be in decline -- and why the emergency declaration wasn’t mentioned when the issue of prison population trends came up at an April 21 state Senate hearing.

They also expressed frustration that the department did not know how much it would cost to deal with the extra inmates.

“It’s kind of disturbing,” said state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica). Kuehl said that nobody from corrections who testified at the earlier hearing had mentioned a “crushing onslaught of new prisoners that caused this.”

Upon learning of the declaration last week, lawmakers questioned whether the emergency was manufactured by officials in the troubled corrections system who were hoping to avoid looming budget cuts.

The department is already $544.8 million over budget this year, largely as a result of overtime payments and other benefits provided to prison guards that the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is seeking to scale back.

Corcoran took issue with the suggestion that corrections workers would manufacture a crisis to get more overtime.

“Contrary to what is being reported, the vast majority of my members would prefer not to spend their time in prison, but to go home,” he said.

Corcoran warned that cramming as many as 300 inmates into a single gymnasium, with only three or four guards to watch them, puts his members in a dangerous position. “Any time you have this situation, there are enormous blind spots,” he said. “We would prefer not to have this.”

Corrections officials said they might have to move as many as 2,000 prisoners to make room for hundreds of unanticipated inmates. The system now has 162,515 inmates -- just 18 shy of the record capacity that was reached in 2000.

Conversions are underway at Folsom State Prison, California State Prison at Solano, Pleasant Valley State Prison, Avenal State Prison, and Chuckawalla Valley State Prison.

Lawmakers expressed concern that uprooting so many prisoners would interfere with their rehabilitation. Many of the prisoners being moved are in education programs.

Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) asked why corrections officials hadn’t seen the spike in population coming and made moves to deal with it proactively to avoid uprooting so many inmates.

“I’ve seen some of these triple-bunked gyms,” she said. “You know what? It is not a pretty picture.”

Romero then asked whether the department’s actions were akin to moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.

Woodford defended her department’s actions, saying corrections workers cannot predict every temporary surge in the prison population, and that parole reforms will probably result in the earlier anticipated decrease of inmates in the coming weeks. “Are we perfect? We can’t be perfect,” Woodford said. “We do it based on trends. And this time we got surprised.”