State's $7.4 billion prison expansion is signed into law

(05-04) 04:00 PDT Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Thursday that will lead to a huge prison expansion with unknown but potentially dramatic long-term costs and will require a major increase in the kind of inmate rehabilitative services that prison managers have routinely botched in the past decade.

Surrounded by law enforcement officials and lawmakers from both parties, Schwarzenegger presided over a celebratory news conference on the Capitol steps to enact plans to initially spend $7.4 billion to build 40,000 new prison beds and 13,000 new county jail beds. The cost of operating the expanded facilities is unknown, however, but expected to be in the billions. Estimates could be released later this month.

The new law also requires the department to increase inmate programs such as drug treatment and vocational education in an effort to help felons stay crime-free once they leave prison.

The governor said the plan could end threats from federal judges to take further control of the legally troubled and dangerously overcrowded prisons, and he touted the new emphasis on rehabilitation services as "a monumental shift in how we manage prisons in California.''

But plenty of questions remain about the plan.

Lawyers for inmates who have asked federal judges to limit the prison population -- the impetus for the plan approved by the Legislature last week -- say the proposal does virtually nothing to address the problem in the short term, and they will argue next month in court that the limit still is needed.

Prison officials do not know how much the proposal will eventually cost. While taxpayers will spend about $15 billion paying off the bonds used to pay for construction costs, operating the new prison beds also will add billions of dollars to a prison budget that has easily been the fastest-growing part of the state budget during Schwarzenegger's tenure.

And the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has been repeatedly criticized for poorly managing inmate programs.

The state inspector general, a prison watchdog agency, reported in February that drug treatment programs in prisons had been so mismanaged that the state had wasted $1 billion and that inmates who went through the programs actually returned to prison for parole violations or new crimes at a higher rate than inmates who didn't receive the treatment.

The agency noted that state officials had received at least 20 reports since 1997 telling them the programs weren't working but did little to improve them -- instead they expanded them.

A key component of the system's inmate educational programs consists of requiring inmates to fill out workbooks once a week with virtually no classroom time. Some inmates in the program are illiterate or don't read English.

"You're sliding a packet to an inmate in his cell," said Marc Bautista, a representative of the union that represents prison teachers. "There's no way to really tell who's doing the work.''

And more than three years after agreeing in federal court to upgrade drug treatment and other programs for parolees who are in danger of returning to prison for violating parole conditions, California's prison system has made negligible progress, according to a recent report by a court-appointed monitor overseeing parts of the parole system. There are no state-funded residential drug treatment programs for parolees in Los Angeles County, for example, where 40 percent of the state's parolees live.

The failure to provide programs for parolees is a major driver for prison overcrowding -- a recent report by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation noted that the number of new admissions to prisons from court-imposed sentences was down in 2006, but the number of parolees returned to prison for a parole violation grew by nearly 13 percent.

Add ongoing hiring problems at all levels -- one-quarter of the prisons' teaching positions are vacant, and one-third of the state's 33 prisons do not have a permanent warden -- and even some supporters of the new legislation say they don't think the department will be able to implement the rehabilitation programming it calls for.

"I must say this tests any article of faith that I've ever been associated with,'' Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said last week as the Legislature approved the plan. "I do not, as I stand here, believe that this job can get done."

Many prison experts argue lawmakers and the governor should have concentrated on sentencing and parole reforms that could have reduced the prison population instead of expanding a dysfunctional system.

"If you want to see how this will work, look at the juvenile system,'' said Dan MacAllair, head of San Francisco's Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Responding to a lawsuit, the state has increased spending on programs for wards, but violence in the youth system has increased.

Secretary of Corrections Jim Tilton acknowledged the hard task ahead of him but said the overwhelming support from the governor and Legislature to increase and improve programs would lead to changes. And the legislation requires a new board that will include the inspector general's office, which wrote the scathing February report on inmate drug treatment programs, to monitor the new rehabilitation services.

"I think there is consensus that this needs to happen,'' Tilton said.

Whether that concern will continue during future budget negotiations will be a big question.

The deal lawmakers and the governor cut last week only provides $50 million in new money for inmate programs, and the operational costs of bringing new prison beds and programs online will be yearly additions to the budget. Tilton noted that a major component of the new plan, to construct 16,000 so-called re-entry beds that will provide inmates about to leave the prison system with intensive programming, could cost as mush as $165,000 per bed to operate each year.

That's $2.6 billion to run all 16,000 beds, or more than one-fifth of the current total budget for state prisons.

E-mail Mark Martin at markmartin@sfchronicle.com.