In the face of a federal court order to cut the state's 170,000-inmate prison population by one-third, the president of California's powerful prison guards'
union said he backs a state sentencing commission to reform prison terms.

Speaking to a University of California Hastings College of Law prison reform conference, Michael Jimenez said of the 37,000-member union, lawmakers see "danger in being called soft on crime, but we are ready to say we will not run ads against people who stand up for [the sentencing commission]. "We can't overcome the gridlock [in the Legislature]. We need a sentencing commission,"
he said.

In the past, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has targeted politicians, district attorneys and a few trial judges, for defeat in elections when it disagreed with their policies or decisions. In some rural counties, where a prison is the largest employer, the union has the power to sway a local election.

The state has attempted to reform its complex patchwork of sentencing laws with the creation of a sentencing commission in nearly a dozen failed legislative attempts dating back to 1984, according to Karen Dansky, executive director of Stanford University's Criminal Justice Center.

California, with the largest prison system in the country, faces overcrowding levels that have reached nearly 200% of capacity. The federal courts have taken over managing the quality of mental health care in one civil rights suit and the physical health of inmates in a separate case, based on findings that conditions are so poor that the inmates' constitutional rights have been violated.

Currently, a special three-judge panel has held that the overcrowding problems contribute to the poor health care delivery and have told the state it can't build its way out of the problem with new prisons but should reduce the numbers by more than 50,000 inmates. That decision is currently on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton of the Eastern District of California in Sacramento is one of the three panel members who found the need to release inmates. He has also presided over the mental health care civil rights case for 14 years. He told the Hastings conference Friday, "In 1995 I found a violation of the Constitution due to the poor mental health care. And 14 years later, I am struggling to bring the prisons into compliance," he said.

"Now I am dealing with the lack of a bed plan for the mentally ill in prison; think about that, after 14 years there is no bed plan," Karlton said.

The state Legislature currently has a new proposal to create a sentencing commission, but a similar effort failed in 2007.
The "California Correctional Crisis Conference" at Hastings ran from March 19 to 20 in San Francisco.