California Department Of Corrections

The counselor at Salinas Valley State Prison paid a surprise visit to Nicholas Shearin's cell with good news: He would go home in two days, after a decade behind bars. She did not mention that he should have been freed eight months earlier. Shearin was among as many as 33,000 state inmates whose sentences may have been wrong because they were not given all the time off they earned for good behavior and for working in prison.

California does a bad job of compensating people wrongfully convicted in its courts, a blue ribbon commission said Friday. Men and women imprisoned for years, even decades, for crimes they didn't commit are offered fewer benefits than convicts released on parole, the commission said.

Three decades of tough-on-crime lawmaking has sent California's prison system into a "tailspin," creating the most pressing crisis facing the state, the government's own watchdog panel declared Thursday. In a blistering 84-page report, the nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission linked the problems plaguing the correctional system to political cowardice among governors and lawmakers fearful of being labeled soft on crime.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Friday that his administration would forcibly shift thousands of inmates to out-of-state prisons because only a few hundred had volunteered to leave. The governor's decision escalates the pressure to overhaul a corrections system that officials say will be out of space by summer. A federal judge has given the state until June to relieve the crowding or face a possible cap on admissions.

The man charged with fixing California's prison medical system sought Tuesday to expand those powers by taking over the hiring of guards. Saying he cannot improve deplorable medical care in prisons if there aren't enough correctional officers to escort inmates to doctors, receiver Robert Sillen asked the federal judge who appointed him to grant him oversight of the state's program for recruiting prison guards. Sillen also said that a bill signed by Gov.

A mentally disturbed state prison inmate being transferred into a Los Angeles County jail last month was examined by mental health workers, who declared him fit to be placed in the general jail population. That finding caused Kurt Karcher, a convicted killer with a bipolar disorder, to be moved into a cell with inmate Jose Daniel Cruz.

Until California eases prison overcrowding, it can't slow the revolving prison doors that return roughly 70% of freed inmates within a year, national experts reported to the Legislature on Friday.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A man who was mistaken for a deported felon and held in a Los Angeles County jail for 25 days may sue the state for negligence, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday. Rejecting lower court rulings, the state high court said Lenin Freud Perez-Torres, 35, may sue on the grounds that authorities knew or should have known they had the wrong man. Perez-Torres was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in April 2000.

SACRAMENTO -- A high-ranking commissioner at the state parole board, which makes decisions about whether criminals should remain in prison, is on the job 11 days after he was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol at 2 a.m. in a state-owned vehicle, state corrections officials said Friday. Robert T. Rodriguez, 57, an associate chief deputy commissioner for the Central Valley, had a blood-alcohol content double the legal limit, police said.

The chief executive of the state parole board, who was riding as a passenger when a subordinate was arrested last month on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol in a government car, submitted his resignation Monday to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Monday, 56, a 34-year veteran of state government, was appointed by Schwarzenegger in August and confirmed in the state Senate after serving as acting chief since May 2006. Monday was a passenger on Nov. 27 in a car driven by Robert T.