Prisons

A lawyer for the state, citing "dramatic improvements" in state prisons, asked a federal judge Monday to end a receiver's control of California's prison healthcare system. Paul Mello, representing the state, told U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson that there has been a "virtual elimination of alleged preventable deaths" due to shoddy prison health services. "Circumstances have changed," Mello said. But James J.

Like many folks in this tranquil town, Patty Liberty has no problem living just down the road from some of the world's most notorious terrorists. Zacarias Moussaoui, known as "the 20th hijacker" for his attempts to join in the Sept. 11 attacks, resides at the supermax prison just outside the city limits. So do would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and Ramzi Yousef, who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski lives there too.

California prison officials, facing severe overcrowding and a financial crisis, have been granting early releases to inmates serving time for parole violations. State officials said the dozens of prisoners set free from the California Institution for Men in Chino and from lockups in San Diego and Shasta counties had 60 days or less left on their terms, or had been accused of violations and were awaiting hearings. The releases were approved by the state parole board.

A few times a week, Joseph Dole stands in a back corner of the outdoor recreation area at Tamms Correctional Center, straining to catch a ray of sunlight. "About four feet gets sun," said the rail-thin Dole, who is serving a life sentence for murder. "You can only get it if they call yard between 11 and 1. I just stand there. You feel warm, you feel refreshed." Another murderer, Adolfo Rosario, said he hadn't shaken anyone's hand since his transfer to Tamms 11 years ago.

North Korea's sentencing of two American TV journalists to 12 years of hard labor Monday could imperil the Obama administration's already difficult goal of curtailing the authoritarian nation's nuclear weapons ambitions. If no deal is reached, the two women face a grim future in a brutal prison system notorious for its lack of adequate food and medical supplies and its high death rate.

For more than four decades, a dreary, two-level jail in a corner of the Los Angeles Police Department's downtown headquarters has been an unwelcome pit stop for thousands of men arrested in the city each year. Accused of petty theft, murder or anything in between, the Parker Center Jail is where one waits -- sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days -- to see a judge. Never a pleasant place, the jail has fallen into increasing depths of disrepair and inadequacy over the years.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday asked a panel of federal judges to delay their order that the state produce a plan to reduce prison crowding, saying he would take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court if they did not grant the request. In the motion filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the governor said the order should be delayed pending an appeal to be filed Thursday in the Supreme Court, arguing that the state would probably win in the nation's high court. The order was issued Aug. 4 by judges overseeing two lawsuits filed by inmates complaining of inadequate medical and mental health treatment.

The federal government is looking for contractors to build a possible detention center in the Los Angeles area that would hold up to 2,200 illegal immigrants and others suspected of violating immigration laws. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said last week that the agency was "exploring the feasibility of such a project," though she said no definitive decisions had been made.

Pledging more oversight and accountability, the Obama administration announced plans Thursday to transform the nation's immigration detention system from one reliant on a scattered network of local jails and private prisons to a centralized one designed specifically for civil detainees.

State prison officials have confiscated 4,130 contraband cellphones this year, more than all those seized in the previous three years combined, according to an internal report released Thursday. The findings sparked concern among legislators that the proliferation of cellphones in state lockups is a growing security problem. More than 100 illegal phones were discovered at the California Institution for Men in Chino, including 10 in August, according to the report from Matthew Cate, head of the state prisons system.