$4 Billion, for building bigger prisons

By Don Thompson
The Associated Press
April 24, 2012 12:00 AM
SACRAMENTO — California prison officials released a wide-ranging reorganization plan Monday that calls for halting a $4 billion prison-construction program and bringing back all inmates held out of state.

The master plan outlines the department's recommendations for ending years of federal court oversight, overcrowding, poor inmate medical and mental health treatment, and soaring budgets.

It came at a time when the nation's largest state prison system is being transformed by ongoing state budget deficits, federal court orders and a realignment ordered by the governor that shifts its focus to the most violent and dangerous offenders.

The changes are possible because of a state law that took effect Oct. 1 that shifts lower-level offenders from state prisons to county jails. That shift is the main consequence of a federal court order requiring the state to reduce its prison population as a way to improve inmate medical care.

“It's a massive change to our system,” Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said at a Capitol news conference.

Lowering the inmate population eliminates the need for $4.1 billion in construction projects and will let the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reduce its annual budget by $1.5 billion, officials said.

The department does not plan to scale back on its plans to construct new facilities southeast of Stockton, officials said Monday.

The plan calls for returning to state prisons by 2016 about 9,500 inmates who are housed in private prisons in other states. That alone would save the state $318 million a year.

But prison officials also acknowledged for the first time that they will not meet a June 2013 deadline ordered by federal judges for reducing the state's prison population to end poor medical and mental health care.

The Corrections Department said it will ask federal judges to allow the state to keep an additional 6,000 inmates behind bars, exceeding the limit set by a special panel. The court's order was upheld last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the high court also gave the state leeway to negotiate the final inmate count.

The state will have difficulty demonstrating why the judicial panel and the nation's high court were wrong in setting a lower population cap, said Rebekah Evenson, an attorney with the Berkeley-based nonprofit Prison Law Office, which plans to oppose the move.

Prison officials likely would have to continue housing inmates in private prisons out of state if the court rejects the state's higher goal for its inmate population and orders it to meet next year's deadline.

The federal courts had ordered the state to reduce its inmate population by 40,000 from the record high of 173,479 in 2006, ruling that jamming inmates into triple bunks, day rooms, gyms and other areas was preventing the rapid and efficient delivery of medical care.

The Corrections Department has shed a little more than 20,000 prisoners so far.

While it argues against building new prisons, the Corrections Department is going with a separate plan to build medical and mental health facilities to accommodate the mandates of a federal receivership that has been in place since 2006. That includes a new prison hospital in Stockton to treat inmates requiring long-term medical care and intensive mental health treatment.

The Stockton facility remains on track for a 2013 opening.

State Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate called the Stockton facility “the keystone” of the system's plans to regain control of health care operations from the federal courts.

“No only are we on track for the new medical prison, but we are going to take the DeWitt (Nelson) facility in that same Stockton complex and turn it into an annex to the medical prison,” Cate said. “So we'll not only have the health care facility, but we'll be turning DeWitt into another health care program.”

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Judge Napolitano fired from fox news for speaking out ABOUT THIS!

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San Jose meth bust: 750 lbs

A Palo Alto police investigation into stolen iPads has led to one of the largest methamphetamine busts in the country's history, federal investigators said Saturday.

Police and federal agents seized 750 pounds of methamphetamine, with an estimated street value of $34 million, from a San Jose apartment Thursday after Palo Alto investigators spotted the drugs while following up on stolen iPads, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The bust "is one of the largest we are aware of," DEA Special Agent Casey Rettig said.

Investigators found "boxes and boxes and boxes containing bags and bags and bags of methamphetamine" inside the apartment, Rettig said.

The 750 pounds, or 340 kilograms, of methamphetamine confiscated in San Jose is equal to about 16 percent of all methamphetamine seized across the country last year, according to figures on the U.S. Department of Justice website.

Three people were arrested on state drug violations after the raid on an apartment in the 4400 block of Woods Drive, authorities said. They have not released their identities. Rettig described the investigation as "very fluid" and said "there is definitely the potential for more arrests."

The home is part of the Woods, a subdivision in south San Jose that its website highlights as a "park-like setting of mature trees, formal landscaped gardens, greenbelts and tranquil ponds maintained to award-winning standards."

Palo Alto detectives pursuing the electronics theft conducted a preliminary search of the apartment and saw "a large quantity of methamphetamine," according to the DEA. They then called in help from San Jose police and the Santa Clara County district attorney, who called the DEA.

Investigators believe the home was being used both as a residence and as a laboratory where powdered methamphetamine was converted into a crystal form, also referred to as "ice." Such methamphetamine has an appearance often described as that of broken glass or shattered ice and is ingested by smoking, federal officials said.

Rettig said it was too early in the investigation to link the lab to known drug cartels or trafficking networks, but she indicated that the trend in large methamphetamine busts in Central and Northern California involves ice conversion labs for drugs primarily smuggled in from Mexico.

Last month, the Mexican army seized 15 tons of pure methamphetamine with an estimated U.S. street value of $4 billion. The sheer size of the haul from that raid in western Mexico "could potentially put a huge dent in the supply chain in the U.S," DEA spokesman Rusty Payne said at the time.

Investigators in the San Jose raid also found stolen items that had initially led Palo Alto police there, Rettig said, including iPads.

Chronicle news services and San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Jill Tucker contributed to this report.

John Coté is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.