Prisons

The Legislature is on the verge of two major achievements -- on prisons and water -- if lawmakers can be calm and rational during the final week of this year's regular session. That means cooling the heated rhetoric -- particularly the staff-produced nastiness -- and sustaining an amiable climate for compromise. It also means settling for the merely significant rather than insisting on the spectacular. It's about what is politically feasible, not what's pure fantasy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will need to be a partner, if not a leader.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday evening gave federal judges a road map to reducing state prison overcrowding. But the proposal would take more than twice as long as the judges ordered to make the improvements they demanded and would fall short if state lawmakers did not approve certain provisions, administration officials said. The plan appears to set up a confrontation between the governor and the judges, who made their impatience clear in ordering the state to forge a plan to reduce the number of inmates by 40,000 within two years.

In late 2001, when the Pentagon decided to put detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of setting up a camp and establishing its rules went to Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert. Lehnert planned to rely on what he learned while running a camp at Guantanamo in the mid-1990s for nearly 19,000 Cubans and Haitians trying to flee to the United States. And he was determined to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva Convention, providing decent food, banning extreme interrogation and allowing religious services.

Gina Tatum spends her days in a compound surrounded by electrified fence in the sun-baked heart of the Central Valley, hoping to change her life. She will soon turn 50, and after two decades in and out of prison, she says she is tired of victimizing others, tired of stealing, tired of doing drugs. "I can't afford any more years up here -- I've lost too many," said Tatum, who is serving a four-year stint for forgery at the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla. "I'm trying to learn things to change my thinking, change everything about me, so I can go home.

More than 50,000 people are arrested across the Navajo reservation each year -- yet there are only 59 jail beds here. Officials say the lack of jail space has led to a revolving door for criminals, most of whom are released within a day of being booked, and few of whom serve out an entire sentence. "It's been a horrendous situation," said Hope MacDonald-Lonetree, a Navajo council delegate. "You can't assure the safety of the police and judges and the prosecutors when you have the perpetrators running around.

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.

In addition to housing foreign detainees, an Illinois state prison could become a site for military trials of those charged with acts of terrorism, an administration official acknowleged Monday. As the Obama administration works to identify a detention facility for prisoners transferred from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, federal officials also are considering sites to hold military commission trials for at least some of the suspects.

Prison films and sports movies define guy cinema, and "The Longest Yard," directed by Robert Aldrich, is the sinewy synthesis of the two, like "Cool Hand Luke" but with Joe Namath on the chain gang. This movie found the perfect star in Burt Reynolds under center (in comparison, Adam Sandler in the 2005 remake seemed like, well, a waterboy). Reynolds was at the height of his good ol' boy cinema, following up on "Deliverance" and "White Lighting" and still in possession of that virile menace that he would later trade for Southern slapstick.

The number of people on parole and probation in the U.S. has surged past 5 million, according to a new report that says states can save money in the long run by investing in better supervision of these offenders. The Pew Center on the States report says the number of people on probation or parole more than tripled to 5.1 million from 1982 to 2007. Including jail and prison inmates, the total population of the U.S. corrections system now exceeds 7.3 million -- one of every 31 U.S. adults, it said.