California Department Of Corrections

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.

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.

Lawyers for the state Legislature said Thursday that government contracts set to ship hundreds of inmates to four private prisons outside California beginning next month were unconstitutional. The opinion by the Legislative Counsel, a nonpartisan legal office that provides policy advice to lawmakers, casts a legal shadow over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to relieve the prison crowding crisis by housing some inmates out of state in lockups run by private firms.

Corrections officials prepared to sign the first contract allowing prisoners to be shipped to other states Thursday as legislators debated the plan's merits and one expert said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should forget short-term fixes and instead convene a bipartisan summit on punishment in California.

With California's jam-packed prisons nearly out of room for more felons, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday proclaimed a state of emergency, an unusual move that could allow the transfer of inmates as soon as next month to other states without their consent. The governor said he was taking the extraordinary step because teeming conditions have created a health risk and "extreme peril" for officers and inmates at 29 of the state's 33 prisons.

A former correctional officer who was hazed by co-workers at Ironwood State Prison in Blythe -- and later stabbed outside his house after reporting the incident -- was pushed out of his job and eventually forced to retire because he was labeled a snitch, his attorney argued in court Monday.

Ask John Hagar about the state of the state's prisons and he gets right to the point. California's correctional system is in crisis, he says, and the governor's election-year ambitions are bedeviling efforts to fix it. Last week, Hagar laid out his case at an extraordinary hearing in a San Francisco courtroom. As stunned onlookers stifled gasps, Hagar, a special master overseeing prison reforms for a federal judge, fired a barrage of accusations at Gov.

The widening debate over California's prison crisis turned hostile Wednesday, as a federal court monitor called a top aide to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a liar and said he would order the aide to testify under oath about the administration's relationship with the politically powerful guards union. Special Master John Hagar reiterated his view that the governor had abandoned reforms to appease the guards.

State Treasurer Phil Angelides on Thursday said California's sprawling prison system was suffering a "meltdown" and vowed to declare a state of emergency for corrections if he was elected governor in November. Accusing Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of standing by as overcrowding, inmate healthcare and other problems in the state's 33 adult prisons worsened, the Democratic nominee released a plan that he said would rescue the $8.2-billion system from the brink of collapse.

After launching "one of the most productive periods of prison reform" in California history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has retreated from the cause and given the guards union a "disturbing" level of clout over prison policy and operations, a federal court investigator charged Wednesday.