Hot on the heels of smack-talking a campaign rival’s self-funding, Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, D-Newark, today announced a new role in which he could either boost or undermine his campaign for state Attorney General: He’ll chair the new Assembly Select Committee on Prison and Rehabilitation Reform.

In a state now renowned for dysfunctional government, the prison and rehabilitation system takes the cake: rampant overcrowding, copious contraband, heavy gang influence, runaway recidivism, a health-care system so bad it’s been placed in federal receivership, etc.

“We can no longer risk ignoring California’s prison crisis. For the first time in the state’s history, California spent more money on prisons than higher education last fiscal year. California needs to stop ignoring and start reforming our prison system,” Torrico said in his news release. “This Governor will give his State of the State address tomorrow. But the time has come to state the obvious – we can’t fix what’s wrong with California until we fix our broken and costly prison system.”

If Torrico’s committee can successfully start mitigating one or more of these problems, it’s an instant, firm campaign platform plank; if not, inaction or failure could provide fodder for his campaign rivals’ attacks. Of course, June’s Democratic primary is just five months away, so perhaps there’s enough time for him to tout his role as chairman and not enough time for anyone to seriously expect him to accomplish much…

State Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is trying to land a one-two punch on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s three-day-a-month furloughs of state employees.

Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Ken Jacobs, chairman of the University of California Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, will hold a news conference tomorrow at the State Capitol to release a study on “The High Cost of Furloughs,” which shows the governor’s three-day-a-month furlough program saves less than anticipated, offset by less revenue and higher costs in future years, while dragging down the Sacramento region’s already struggling economy.

Earlier today, Steinberg rolled out a different study from the nonpartisan state Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes which found furlough savings aren’t being realized for at least a third of the roughly 100,000 state employees paid from the general fund with round-the-clock jobs; the furlough policy is just pushing labor costs to future years while adding more costs.

“This report is further confirmation that the administration’s furlough program was poorly thought out and will not deliver long-term savings for the general fund,” Steinberg said of this study. “In round-the-clock operations like prisons and state developmental centers, the furlough program is not reducing hours over the long-term, it is simply deferring paychecks.”

“Furloughs in Round-the-Clock Operations: Savings are Illusory,” analyzed payroll data from the State Controller’s Office and interviews with top prison, developmental services and mental health officials. Among the findings Steinberg is touting:

In round-the-clock institutions, employees in positions that must be filled day and night generally aren’t taking off three days per month; while absorbing the 14 percent reduction in pay, they’re working the “furlough” days and banking time to be taken off later on. In the prisons, which employ 70 percent of all state workers paid by the general fund, officials say the long-term cost of furloughs is greater than the savings; corrections officials say they were told by the administration that short-term payroll savings are more important than future liabilities. Correctional workers banked 1.5 million furlough hours between February and August this year; most are correctional officers, and at $34.91 an hour, that’s a future liability of at least $52 million.

When correctional officers do take time off, they generally use furlough days instead of vacation days, so from February through August, the number of unused vacation days accrued by correctional officers jumped 500 percent – a potential boondoggle for future prison staffing, and costlier because many workers will be at a higher pay rate when they finally do use their vacation time.

Furloughs fail to save the $108 million projected by the administration in the prison healthcare system, according to the court-appointed receivership now that system; the costs of paying overtime and hiring private workers to fill in for furloughed workers will exceed any savings. In fact, the court-appointed receiver says furloughs are projected to increase costs within the prison health care system by $37 million to $47 million this year.

Similar bankings of furlough and vacation time are happening in California’s dozen mental hospitals and developmental centers, creating the same kinds of future liabilities.

The governor visited San Francisco today mainly to stump for the May special election budget-reform agenda, but lots of other topics came up during a question-and-answer period as well.

For example, he said he’s “absolutely” in favor of extending Legislative term limits; former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez had the right idea with last year’s Proposition 93, but would’ve fared better with voters if he’d packaged term limits with redistricting reform to prove he wasn’t “acting out of selfish reasons.” Nunez, along with then-state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, were among lawmakers who would’ve been “grandfathered” into longer tenures had the measure passed.

Lawmakers need two or three years just to learn the ropes and get up to speed, Schwarzenegger said today; under current rules, that’s half the time someone can spend in the Assembly. “I think it’s a disservice to the California people,” he said.

Lots more, after the jump…
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A well-known criminologist who has advised Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on overhauling California’s prison system has been appointed to the Stanford Law School faculty as a professor.

Joan Petersilia most recently has been a Professor of Criminology, Law and Society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, where she directed the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections.

The author of eight books on corrections policy, Petersilia has brought her research on parole reform, prisoner reintegration and sentencing policy to bear on California’s prisons as a special advisor to the governor since 2003. She helped reorganize juvenile and adult corrections, create a new Office of Research and an Office of Policy and Planning, and work with the California Legislature to implement prison and parole reform.

Petersilia will also serve as faculty co-director for the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, helping the center to assess policies on crime control, sentencing, and corrections, and to develop nonpartisan analyses and recommendations to help public officials, the legal community and the public understand state and national criminal justice policy.

Before Irvine, Petersilia directed the Criminal Justice Program at RAND Corp., a leading social science think tank, and served as president of the American Society of Criminology. She’s also the former director of the National Research Council’s study on Crime Victims with Disabilities; the former director of the California Policy Research Center’s study on Criminal Offenders with Developmental Disabilities; and served as a visiting professor at Stanford Law from 2005 to 2006. She holds a doctorate in Criminology, Law & Society from UC-Irvine; a Master’s degree in sociology from Ohio State University and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Loyola University of Los Angeles.

Has it really been three months since last I did this? Shame on me.

McCain discusses
ACORN, Ayers as Dow drops;
Rome burns, he fiddles.

Pay for inmate health,
Judge now tells California.
Years late, still we balk.

A fine governor
Jerry Brown could make again,
Schwarzenegger says.

No stance before vote,
Andal blasts McNerney’s call.
A bailout “gotcha?”

I listened in on a conference call this morning as California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse rolled out a report called “Citizens in Chains,” arguing that the state spends too much dealing with prison inmates’ lawsuits and so should pass new laws to weed out frivolous cases from the get-go.

“On average, prisoners file more than two lawsuits every business day, costing the state more than $191 million over the past six years,” the report says. “Given the budget cuts that all of California’s departments are facing this year, the $32 million spent on average each year for prisoner-initiated litigation could certainly be reappropriated for programs more in line with taxpayers’ interests.”

“Some lawsuits of course have merit and need to proceed through the civil justice system,” San Diego CALA president Lorie Zapf said on the conference call.

The report provides a few anecdotes: an inmate who sued over not being allowed to receive certain magazines and catalogs; a convicted murder who sued claming prison security lockdowns caused him stress, anxiety, depression, headaches, and muscle cramps (and won $39,000 in punitive damages from a federal jury); and a death-row inmate who unsuccessfully sued an author and publisher for $62 million, claiming they’d smeared his “good name” and “hurt his prospects for future employment.”

With “such a huge mounting of litigation each year since 2003… you can only extrapolate that a lot of these suits would not be there if we had these reforms,” Zapf said.

But that’s a lot of extrapoliation. The report notes the state departments of Justice and Corrections and Rehabilitation together have 135.3 staff positions dedicated to handling inmate lawsuits; that CDCR has spent $5.6 million on outside counsel since mid-2002; and that settlements and judgments for adult inmates have cost $89.5 million since mid-2000 — but nowhere does it estimate how much of these costs are due to what it would deem frivolous litigation.

And if the state has had to pay out $23.3 million in legal settlements and $66.2 million in judgments to inmates in the past eight years, perhaps judges and juries don’t see a lot of these lawsuits as quite so frivolous after all.

The report goes on to cite two bills which it claims would’ve helped with “these often ridiculous lawsuits:”

Each year, common sense reforms are brought before the Legislature and each year they are rejected when the personal injury bar calls in the favors they purchase from legislators through their campaign contributions. This past year, Assembly Bill 1891, which would have allowed courts to carve frivolous claims out of a lawsuit while allowing the portions of a suit with merit to continue, failed to pass out of committee. This bill also would have given judges the authority to order payment of attorney’s fees for frivolous or delaying tactics. Senate Bill 423, which would have capped punitive damages awards at three times compensatory damages, suffered the same fate.

Yet both those bills go far, far beyond prison walls. An Assembly Judiciary Committee staff analysis of AB 1891 found the bill “revives an obsolete code section that was allowed to effectively sunset and has been replaced by a longstanding alternative approach that was enacted and repeatedly extended with unanimous bipartisan support;” it also found the bill appears to create multiple inconsistent standards for evaluating and penalizing improper conduct in court proceedings.” The committee cast a 7-3 party-line vote to kill the bill in March.

And a Senate Judiciary Committee staff analysis of SB 423, which was supported by the California Chamber of Commerce, found it “would be more restrictive than U.S. Supreme Court rulings and would even limit punitive damages in cases of extraordinarily reprehensible conduct.” That committee killed that bill on a 3-2 party-line vote in January.

Yesterday’s editions carried a story about how the governor has moved the longtime director of the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs over into the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to take over the state prisons’ substance-abuse treatment programs, which a new report from the state Inspector General calls an utter disaster.

Read that report here. And here’s an older report, from last October, on similar issues.

A highlight from the executive summary of this week’s report:

This litany of problems adds up to a $1 billion failure — failure to provide an environment that would allow the programs to work; failure to provide an effective treatment model; failure to ensure that the best contractors are chosen to do the job at the lowest possible price; failure to oversee the contractors to make sure they provide the services they agree to provide; failure to exert the fiscal controls necessary to protect public funds; failure to
learn from and correct mistakes — and most tragically, failure to help California inmates change their lives and, in so doing, make our streets safer.