LONG BEACH, Calif. - Former Gov. George Deukmejian, the law-and-order politician who helped build California's prison system into the nation's largest, told a government reform panel Friday that the state must provide more education and job training to inmates to keep them from committing more crimes.
Deukmejian, a Republican sometimes referred to as "Iron Duke" by critics, assured the panel he has not gone soft on crime since leaving office 13 years ago.
"This is not about coddling criminals," he told a public hearing of the California Performance Review commission devoted to corrections reform and public safety. "This is about protecting the public."
Deukmejian said the state must provide education and job training to adults and juveniles while they are in custody to help reduce the state's 70 percent recividism rate, one of the highest in the nation. He added that prison officials should evaluate inmates and their needs when they enter the system instead of just before they leave.
The commission is holding public hearings on an overhaul of state government that backers say would save up to $32 billion over the next five years by consolidating departments, cutting growth in state employment and privatizing some operations.
Deukmejian was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as chairman of an independent review panel that evaluated the state's troubled adult and juvenile corrections system. Officials decided there was enough overlap between the two commissions to present the prison reform program to the California Performance Review.
The prison review report, released in July, offered some 200 proposed reforms to what panel members called a "dysfunctional" and "totally ineffective" system.
"Public safety is not served if we are just recycling the same offenders," said Deukmejian, who was governor from 1983-91 and state attorney general before that. "We have to change our attitude toward nonviolent offenders so that they can receive community-based assistance as an alternative to recommitment to prison."
Joe Gunn, a former Los Angeles Police Department official who served as executive director to the prison review panel, said afterward that neither he nor the former governor endorse eliminating prison for nonviolent offenders.
But Gunn said in an interview that both believe California's prison system has moved too far in the direction of punishment over rehabilitation and should offer inmates a way to cut the time they serve behind bars if they don't violate prison rules and achieve educational and counseling goals set at the start of their sentences.
"When they go to prison, we ought to start taking steps to make sure they don't come back," he said.
Andy Hsia-Coron, a teacher at the state prison in Soledad who attended the commission hearing, said he welcomed Deukmejian's endorsement of better schooling for inmates but said the teaching must go beyond basic educational or vocational skills.
The problem now, he said, is that the prisons have too few teachers because positions have long gone unfilled, money for teaching has gone to other purposes and experienced educators have left because the conditions are difficult.
"Our programs are way out of date and as bad as it is most of our inmates can't get in," said Hsia-Coron, who is active in the union that represents teachers at state agencies
California spends nearly $6 billion a year for its 32-prison system, the nation's largest with 163,000 inmates and nearly 50,000 employees. Deukmejian presided over much of the growth at a time of deep public concern about rising crime.
His panel's report proposed eliminating the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency that oversees state prisons and replacing it with a new Department of Correctional Services run by a 10-member commission. Members would conduct public meetings every two months and open the operations to public view.
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