Free Republic

A bill that seeks to abolish California's death penalty advanced Thursday after its first legislative hearing with support from the author of the state's death penalty and a former warden who presided over executions. Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, said she introduced the bill because California can no longer afford a capital punishment system that is both expensive and ineffective as it battles persistent multibillion-dollar budget deficits. If eventually signed into law, the bill would put the question before voters in 2012. The Assembly Public Safety Committee voted 5-2 along party lines in favor of SB490 after hearing testimony from Sacramento...

The watchdog appointed by a federal judge to oversee California prison reforms said Wednesday he wants to force top aides of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to testify under oath in a case that could result in more federal control over the state's deeply troubled corrections system. John Hagar, the special master who reports to U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson, wants the judge to let him conduct a full investigation into whether the administration has been backsliding on reforms since the first of the year. At issue is whether Schwarzenegger's top aides have been currying favor with the state's powerful prison...

GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER hasn't just abandoned his campaign promise to fight the special interests that dominate Sacramento politics. He has thrown it from his favorite Hummer and driven over it. His craven surrender to the tyrannical prison guards union is so complete that his aides have been subverting the authority of the state corrections chief by consulting union officials on her choices for warden positions and other jobs. And that, according to one insider, is the explanation for the resignation Wednesday of Jeanne S. Woodford, acting secretary of the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Woodford quit just two months...

Sacramento -- On the day before Roderick Hickman quit his job as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's corrections czar, he bumped into the lead lobbyist for the state's prison guards union, who was walking out of a meeting with Schwarzenegger's chief of staff [Susan Kennedy]. Hickman became incensed, and the next day he fired off an angry e-mail to Cabinet Secretary Fred Aguiar announcing his resignation and suggesting the governor's office had lost the political will to make big changes in the state's dysfunctional prison system. Hickman, several sources close to him say, was concerned that the union was beginning to have...

<p>SACRAMENTO -- The new chief of the nation's largest prison system says it will take years and wholesale ethics retraining to end a corrosive "code of silence" that she has experienced within the California Department of Corrections.</p> <p>Director Jeanne S. Woodford blamed the prison system's chronic overspending on unrealistic underfunding by the previous administration as costs soared to meet federal and state laws and the requirements of running an around-the-clock operation.</p>