Prisons

SACRAMENTO - A panel of federal judges Thursday threatened to hold Gov. Jerry Brown and other state officials in contempt of court if they do not quickly produce a plan to remove thousands of convicts from California's packed prisons. In a blistering 71-page ruling, the jurists rejected Brown's bid to end restrictions they imposed on crowding in the lockups. The state cannot maintain inmate numbers that violate orders intended to eliminate dangerous conditions behind bars, they said.

SACRAMENTO - Most California voters are willing to take more drastic steps than Gov. Jerry Brown favors to reduce prison crowding, including the early release of nonviolent offenders, but they don't want to sacrifice public safety to reduce the inmate population, according to a new poll. Support for softened penalties comes as Brown is fighting an order from a panel of federal judges to continue shrinking the number of inmates in state prisons. He says California has done enough and any more changes could increase crime.

Gov. Jerry Brown has made it clear how unhappy he is about having to produce a plan to reduce the inmate population of California's prisons by another 9,000. Under the 2011 realignment law, the state has already lowered the prisoner count by 43,000 by diverting many would-be new prisoners to county jails and many would-be parole violators to county supervision. Besides, the governor has argued, the whole point of the court-imposed population cap - 137.5% of capacity - is to resolve serious problems with inmate medical and mental health care, and hasn't that already been done with an enormous new commitment of resources and treatment?

They milled around the room aimlessly, their faces painted - some ghost white, others in different colors like a tribal mask - and they followed the instructions: They glided when they were told to walk as if they were filled with air, then slowed to a deliberate shuffle when told to act like they'd been shackled. "How does that feel?" said their instructor, Sabra Williams, of the Actors' Gang. "What emotions does that trigger?" The group of about a dozen were grown men, prisoners at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, a place where they don't typically let themselves be seen acting foolishly or displaying the kind of emotion that could make them seem vulnerable.

For months, Los Angeles County jail officials have been waiting to reopen a long-shuttered women's facility to help ease some of the overcrowding that plagues the rest of the massive and violence-prone system. But 14 months after the Board of Supervisors voted to spend more than $100 million to refurbish the Sybil Brand Institute, an antiquated structure on a hilltop near East Los Angeles, not a bit of work has been accomplished.

SACRAMENTO - The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stepped in to investigate outbreaks of valley fever in two California prisons where more than three dozen inmates have died after contracting the fungal disease. Staff from the Atlanta-based CDC met with state prison health officials Tuesday and another meeting is planned Thursday. California's health department formally asked for the assistance last week on behalf of a court-appointed monitor, who had previously requested repeatedly that state officials seek federal help.

The county's top prosecutor and other elected officials shared a podium with youthful offenders Friday to oppose state budget cuts that could cripple the state's youth camp system, particularly in Los Angeles County. The hearing, held at Camp Karl Holton, a juvenile probation camp in the Angeles National Forest north of San Fernando, was called by Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) in response to Gov.

California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown waded into the controversy Tuesday over a new law that aims to reduce the state prison population by saying it applies to county jails but should not be read as requiring immediate, large-scale reductions of their populations. The bulletin to law enforcement agencies throughout the state came as the union representing Orange County sheriff's deputies became the second major policing organization to go to court to block use of the law, which appears to speed the process under which county jail inmates are released by changing the formula used to determine time off for good behavior.

The $90 million California is expected to receive from the federal government this year for jailing illegal immigrants convicted of crimes is far short of the state's roughly $1 billion annual cost, officials said. "The federal government has sole control over the nation's borders. The states do not," said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state's finance department. "The incarceration costs associated are borne disproportionally by states like California." Los Angeles County officials have not projected how much in reimbursement funds they could receive this year.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely. Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Three 19-year-olds were sentenced Friday to prison for the robbery and murder of a San Diego college student who answered a Craigslist ad for a computer. Rashon Abernathy was sentenced to 50 years in prison and Seandell Jones and Shaquille Jordan to 25 years to life, all by Superior Court Judge Kerry Wells. Abernathy was also convicted of an earlier Craigslist robbery of a Navy sailor. During the trial, prosecutors said that the three tricked Garrett Berki, 18, a student at San Diego Mesa College, into going to a location in the Paradise Hills neighborhood in May 2011 by using phony names in the listing. Instead of selling him a computer, the three robbed him at gunpoint of $600, prosecutors said.

A 22-year-old Disneyland employee faces the possibility of six years in state prison after Orange County prosecutors Thursday charged him in connection with two explosions that forced a partial evacuation of the Anaheim amusement park. Christian Barnes, who appeared in Orange County Superior Court via a closed-circuit video, entered a not-guilty plea to one count of possessing a destructive device in a public place. The Long Beach man is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail, half the amount he was held on when he was first booked by Anaheim police investigators.

A teenager accused of killing his girlfriend's parents and then driving to stores for party supplies with one of the victims in the back of the vehicle was convicted Wednesday of murder. Prosecutors argued that Giovanni Gallardo and his girlfriend plotted the October 2011 killings and later planned to throw a Halloween party in the Compton mobile home where the adults had been slain. The victims' bodies were found in separate, shallow graves. Jose Lara, 51, had been handcuffed and his body covered with a blanket.

Laywers for Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday argued that he should not be held in contempt for failing to comply with federal court orders to reduce prison crowding, saying it is now up to the Legislature to act. Brown in April offered the federal court plans to reduce prison crowding by about 7,000 more inmates, "under protest" and still not enough to meet the court's population caps. Legislative leaders said they opposed most of what the governor proposed, such as continuing to pay private companies to house inmates out of state.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court gave a second chance Tuesday to prisoners who come up with strong new evidence of their innocence, but who have waited too long to file an appeal. In a 5-4 decision, the justices lifted the one-year time limit for filing such appeals in a federal court. Only the rare case will benefit from this leniency, they said. A prisoner must make a "convincing showing of actual innocence," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. The new evidence must be strong enough to persuade a judge that "no juror, acting reasonably, would have voted to find him guilty" at his trial had the jury known of it, she said.

Abel Maldonado was a young Latino rancher and fresh-faced state lawmaker when he addressed the Republican National Convention in 2000 and was hailed as the GOP's future. Nine years later, he parlayed his deciding vote on tax increases into an appointment as lieutenant governor, albeit for a brief stay. He lost a bid to remain in that job in 2010, and was defeated in a run for Congress last year. But he jumped back onto center stage this month with a brash campaign to repeal Gov. Jerry Brown's corrections policy known as realignment.

It is coming to this: We will have to build more prisons, push the convicts out and lock ourselves in. PAUL DUCHON Laguna Hills

Re "Brown vows fight over prisons," April 13 Federal courts have found the overcrowding and inmate healthcare in California's prisons intolerable, even though Gov. Jerry Brown says officials are "doing the best job possible. " Maybe they're both right and it's the justice system itself that is beyond correction and rehabilitation. Our high-imprisonment system has taken decades to build. It has been fed by harsher sentences without regard for recidivism or public safety; guilty pleas extorted from low-level offenders under pressure from multiple charges that carry long prison terms; the addiction of law enforcement and elected officials to the war on drugs; and released offenders who can't get a job or the public assistance they need to live.

Gov. Jerry Brown's administration disputes complaints that the governor's vocal legal challenges to orders to improve prison conditions has brought progress to a halt. The federal court-appointed medical receiver in charge of prison healthcare filed a progress report Wednesday that said the result of remarks by top state officials that California has spent "too many resources and too much money" on prisons "has been to freeze and ossify" his own progress with the state. Corrections officials responded late Wednesday with their own public statement.

WASHINGTON - Reining back the aggressive counter-terrorism strategy he has embraced for five years, President Obama declared clear, public restrictions for the first time on using unmanned aircraft to kill terrorists, a shift likely to significantly reduce U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. Obama also lifted a ban on sending scores of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to their home countries and renewed his call to move the remaining detainees onto U.S. soil for imprisonment and possible trial in civilian or military courts.