Prisons

A long-standing policy at an Orange County jail that puts tighter restrictions on book deliveries to inmates than those imposed in prisons has irked immigrant families of inmates and local booksellers. Among the books that have been returned to sender are Spanish-language Bibles and other Christian titles. Orange County Sheriff's spokesman Damon Micalizzi said books must come directly from a publisher or a major book distributor for security reasons.

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.

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.

In a report Wednesday to federal judges, the official overseeing prison medical care said Gov. Jerry Brown's public opposition to crowding reductions, and his corrections officials' refusal to move inmates at risk of a deadly disease, show California is unready to run its own prisons. The immediate focus of J. Clark Kelso's ire is California's refusal to implement his May 1 directive requiring the state to move nearly half the inmates from two Central Valley prisons afflicted with valley fever.

White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County jury that convicted him of first-degree murder last month: a death sentence. It wasn't remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all. Although executions are carried out with comparative speed in states such as Virginia, where Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad was put to death Tuesday night, capital punishment in California has become so bogged down by legal challenges as to be a nearly empty threat, say experts on both sides of the issue.

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.

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.

In rioting triggered by racial tensions, more than 2,000 inmates went on a four-hour rampage Saturday at a maximum-security jail in Castaic, leaving one prisoner dead and nearly 50 others injured. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies from throughout the area poured into the North County Correctional Facility, and authorities fired tear gas and pepper balls into dormitories before order was restored.

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

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?

Los Angeles County supervisors unanimously approved a plan Tuesday to study tearing down part of the Men's Central Jail and replacing it with a facility designed for mentally ill and drug-addicted prisoners. The new facility could save the county millions of dollars and offer inmates a better chance of rehabilitation, according to Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who proposed the idea. Yaroslavsky has opposed earlier plans to spend up to $1.4 billion to renovate or replace the Men's Central Jail and the adjacent Twin Towers Jail.

Immigration-related offenses are now the leading type of federal prosecution, constituting more than 40% of cases compared with 22% for drug crimes, according to federal crime data. Many immigrants are now prosecuted because they try to cross the border again after being deported, according to a report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch. Often, they are so desperate to get back to their families in the United States that prison time is not a deterrent, the report said.

NEW DELHI - Myanmar President Thein Sein released some 20 political prisoners Friday, days before a historic summit with President Obama in Washington early next week, according to officials and prisoner rights groups. The ex-general's government denied that the releases were linked to the visit, and activist groups said the nation's leadership had not gone far enough. But the release follows last month's pardon of dozens of political prisoners - one day after the European Union agreed to end most economic sanctions against the former pariah state.

As if you didn't know this already, we're coddling criminals in America. By that I don't mean the petty drug dealers, three-strikes necklace-snatchers and other mooks filling up our state prisons; many of them are doing hard time. I'm talking about people like Jeff Skilling. Skilling, you may recall, was a key architect of the rise and fall of the energy and commodities trading firm Enron, which around the beginning of the last decade claimed the trophy for the biggest securities fraud of all time.

Felons released from prison are committing new crimes at roughly the same rate they did before Gov. Jerry Brown switched their supervision to county probation, but a new report says repeat offenses are up. The study, released by the state corrections department Thursday, holds that there is "very little difference between the one-year arrest and conviction rates of offenders released pre- and post-Realignment. " That was the message highlighted in a press statement from the corrections department.

Behind an unassuming storefront in Orange County's Little Saigon, prosecutors say, was the driving force behind an illicit international trade in rhinoceros horns. Vinh Chuong "Jimmy" Kha and Felix Kha may never have journeyed to the savannas of Africa, but by trafficking in hundreds of pounds of the prized horns that some Vietnamese and Chinese believe can cure cancer, the father and son were responsible for the hundreds of rhinos targeted by poachers, prosecutors said. "Their fingers might as well have been on the triggers of poachers' guns," Assistant U.S. Atty.

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.

In his final State of the State address, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said California must shift its funding priorities from prisons to universities, and The Times couldn't agree more. A world-class, affordable system of higher education was part of what turned a state with remarkable potential in the 1940s into the global capital of scientific, cultural and economic achievement over the last half a century. Any society that spends more on incarcerating its people than providing them university educations won't long remain in its ascendancy.

Abel Maldonado, in his first public move since announcing that he was considering a run for governor, on Wednesday attacked Gov. Jerry Brown's prison policy, arguing that Brown has made Californians unsafe by allowing certain criminals serve their sentences in county jails instead of state prison. Maldonado, the state's former lieutenant governor, will announce Wednesday morning that he is spearheading an effort to put an initiative on the 2014 ballot that would roll back a 2011 bill - AB 109, known as “public-safety realignment” -- which was designed to reduce overcrowding in state prisons.

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?