State Prison

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown has pointed to reams of documents to make the case in court and on the stump that California's prison crisis is over, and inmates are receiving good care. But there is at least one document the administration wanted to hide. New court filings reveal that the state suppressed a report from its own consultant warning that California's prison suicide-watch practices encouraged inmate deaths. Lindsay Hayes, a national expert on suicide prevention in prisons, told corrections officials in 2011 that the state's system of holding suicidal inmates for days in dim, dirty, airless cells with unsanitized mattresses on the floor was compounding the risk that they would take their own lives.

Sex offenders who remove their GPS tracking devices would face up to three years in prison under bill language offered Monday by Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance). According to Lieu, 221 state parolees cut off or tampered with their GPS tracking devices in the 15 months before the enactment of AB 109, the state prison realignment law that made parole violations a county jail offense. In the 15 months after realignment, there were 482 such cases, Lieu said. Both sex offenders and gang members are included in the data.

FT. MEADE, Md. -- Defense lawyers for five alleged Sept. 11 conspirators asked a judge Tuesday to allow them to spend 48 hours at a time, every six months, with their clients deep inside the heavily secured prison at the U.S. Naval Base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in order to document the conditions there and use that information to persuade a jury against the death penalty should the men eventually be convicted of capital murder. The highly unusual request, coming on the second day of a weeklong session of pretrial hearings, was challenged by military and government prosecutors who instead would want to permit just “one single visit” and retain strict and complete control over whom the lawyers talk to and what they see, and be in charge of any of the defense lawyers' written, sketched or photographed observations inside the prison.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown's bid to take full control of California's prisons back from federal courts suffered another setback Friday when the official appointed to oversee all inmate healthcare said the state is not ready. Persistent overcrowding creates "a cascade of consequences that substantially interferes with the delivery of care," said the official, J. Clark Kelso, in a report to the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. He acknowledged improvements in 19 of 20 state prisons recently viewed by state officials.

SACRAMENTO - A court-appointed monitor said Friday that Gov. Jerry Brown's quest to end judicial oversight in state prisons is "not only premature, but a needless distraction" from improving care for mentally ill inmates. Special Master Matthew Lopes cited dozens of suicides last year, long isolation instead of treatment and lapses in care as reasons federal oversight should continue. Lopes' assessment, in a report filed Friday with the U.S. District Court, came after he visited two-thirds of California's prisons.

Former NFL quarterback Ryan Leaf has been moved from a drug treatment center to the state prison in Deer Lodge, Mont., after being kicked out of the center for poor behavior. "The Montana Department of Corrections terminated Leaf from the treatment program and placed him in prison after he was found guilty of behavior that violated conditions of his drug treatment placement," Dawn Handa, regional probation and parole administrator in Great Falls, said in a statement. "The violations included threatening a program staff member.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday named a vocal advocate of shorter sentences and community treatment to run the state's crowded and troubled prison system. Brown announced the selection of Jeffrey Beard, 65, the retired former Pennsylvania prisons chief, to succeed Matthew Cate, who stepped down last month after four years as secretary of corrections in California. Cate is now leader of the California State Assn. of Counties. Beard, whose appointment is subject to Senate confirmation, spent nearly four decades in corrections in Pennsylvania, starting as a counselor and advancing to prison warden, eventually spending nine years as department head.

A multiple homicide outside a Northridge boardinghouse has prompted Los Angeles County supervisors to call for legislation that would prevent state prisoners with a serious criminal history from being released to county supervision. Realignment - intended to help the state meet a federal mandate to reduce its prison population - requires that some felons convicted of nonviolent offenses serve their time in county jails rather than state prison. It has also resulted in some inmates being released to county supervision instead of state parole.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office admitted Monday that its prosecutors erred in allowing a suspect - now accused in the killing of four people in Northridge - to receive drug treatment instead of prison time during a September court hearing. The suspect, Ka Pasasouk, was in Van Nuys Superior Court after being arrested on suspicion of drug possession. He was on probation at the time, and the L.A. County Probation Department had urged that he be sent back to state prison for "long-term detention" because of his lengthy criminal record.

Los Angeles police detectives Tuesday arrested four people at a Las Vegas casino in connection with a quadruple homicide at a Northridge house over the weekend. The four people were taken into custody without incident at the Silverton Hotel and Casino, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announced at a news conference. Beck declined to answer specific questions about the case, including any possible motive for the slayings. Photos: Four killed in Northridge shooting But law enforcement sources told The Times the killings appeared to stem from a dispute over personal property, although they would not say what kind of items were involved.