State Prisons Chief Resigns After 2 Months on the Job

Less than two months after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s corrections chief resigned because he felt politics were interfering with progress, his replacement abruptly followed suit Wednesday, leaving the governor scrambling to find a leader to run the state’s deeply troubled prisons.

Jeanne S. Woodford, who began her corrections career 28 years ago as a guard at San Quentin State Prison, met with the governor at the Capitol and told him later that she was resigning, according to government officials familiar with the situation.

Woodford, who did not return a phone call to her home Wednesday night, will serve temporarily as undersecretary before officially leaving the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in July.

Her departure follows the resignation in February of Roderick Q. Hickman, who said he was moving on because he lacked sufficient political support to bring change to a prison system that is often called a revolving-door warehouse for felons.

California’s “political environment and the power of special interests,” Hickman said at the time, “work against efforts to bring about lasting reform.”

In recent days, Woodford, 52, expressed some of the same concerns, said one official familiar with the situation, who asked not be named because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Woodford was particularly distressed that top aides to Schwarzenegger were consulting the prison guards union about her suggested candidates for warden jobs and other positions in the department, the official said.

One meeting between union officials and the aides took place as recently as Tuesday.

“She just did not like the signals she was getting from the administration,” the official said of Woodford, who had been serving as acting secretary since Hickman’s departure and was a leading candidate to win the job permanently. “She believed labor should go through proper channels [in expressing their input], and that wasn’t happening anymore.”

The back-to-back resignations create a management crisis for the governor at an agency with a multitude of troubles. In addition to Woodford, several other high- and medium-level executives have left since Hickman stepped down.

Morale within the sprawling agency -- which oversees 173,000 adult and juvenile felons and 115,000 parolees -- is said to be dismally low.

The twin departures also undermine one of Schwarzenegger’s most ambitious and widely praised initiatives since taking office: his oft-stated pledge to make California’s dysfunctional prison system a national model once again. “Corrections,” he has said time and again, “should correct.”

With an annual budget of $8.6 billion, the department has many of its operations -- from mental health care to its juvenile prisons -- under federal court supervision. And this week its disgraced medical care system -- which experts have blamed for an average of one inmate death a week -- was placed in the hands of a federal receiver.

The convict population, meanwhile, has hit an all-time high, with many prisons at twice their intended capacity. Vacancies in officer positions are so numerous that guards are routinely working mandatory overtime, a situation their union leaders call untenable.

On Wednesday, a lobbyist with that union, the California Correctional Peace Officers’ Assn., said Woodford had “failed to achieve what we felt was her potential to bring true change to the department.”

Lance Corcoran said that if Woodford’s departure suggests “the union is the bad guy again, then that’s ridiculous.” He said he was unaware of any meeting between the governor’s staff and leaders of his union, but added: “So what if there was? Since when don’t we have the right to communicate?”

A spokeswoman for the governor declined to comment. But in 2004, when Schwarzenegger appointed her director of corrections -- the No. 2 job at the time -- he praised Woodford for a “proven ability to lead,” saying that “she shares my priorities of public safety and accountability and is a tremendous asset.”

Woodford, in turn, said after she was named acting secretary that she believed Schwarzenegger remained committed to reform. “The departure of one person,” she said then, “will not derail the progress we have made.”

Experts have said that Schwarzenegger faces a major challenge in searching for a new corrections secretary with national credentials. UC Irvine criminologist Joan Petersilia said no leader in another state “is going to come to a place where the environment just makes it impossible to do the business of corrections.”

With Woodford withdrawing from the scene, that task becomes more difficult than ever, officials said, especially during a year when Schwarzenegger is running for reelection.

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Times staff writer Peter Nicholas contributed to this report.