PRISONS NEAR CAPACITY

ROBERT Presley, the highly respected former cop and state senator who heads
the state's correctional agency, says that in just two years, "every nook
and cranny" in the state's huge prison system will be filled with inmates.

There are 160,000 inmates now, eight times the 1980 prison population,
thanks to get-tough policies adopted by legislators and voters. And despite
massive prison construction in the 1980s and early 1990s, all but a few
inmates are doubled up in cells designed for one person or housed in
gymnasiums and other temporary quarters.

The projected moment at which the system will be filled to the absolute
brim has changed from time to time. But there's no question that it's
coming and that it will arrive before more prisons can be built, due to
construction lead time.

No one knows what will happen when absolute capacity is reached. But
prisoner rights groups probably will ask a federal court to begin ordering
releases on humanitarian grounds and if they succeed, an unknown judge
would assume effective control of prisons.

The politics of the situation are, to say the least, complicated.

For years, former Gov. Pete Wilson asked legislators to restart prison
construction, but liberal legislators, who disliked the concept on
principle, and conservatives, who disliked spending the money, formed an
odd-bedfellows alliance to rebuff Wilson's demands. Both said they wanted
the state to explore less intensive and/or less expensive alternatives to
incarceration.

A major player has been the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers
Association, which paid lip service to alternatives but backed
construction. More prisons mean more guards and more CCPOA members.

The CCPOA, which had been a strong supporter of Republican Wilson, last
year became an equally ardent and generous backer of Democrat Gray Davis'
ultimately successful campaign for the governorship. And this month, Davis
returned the favor by designating $355 million from the state's revenue
windfall to build a new prison at Delano and begin designing another near
San Diego. It also burnished Davis' carefully nurtured image of being a
Democrat who's as tough as any Republican on crime.

Legislative Democrats just as quickly trashed Davis' prison construction
program. "Keep prisons for those who are violent," Assembly Speaker Antonio
Villaraigosa said this week. And that's where the situation sits as the
annual budget dance begins its final steps.

Republicans are not displeased with Democrats' no-prisons posture. "Let's
say a federal judge steps in and begins releasing inmates and let's say one
of them rapes and murders someone," muses one senior Republican legislator.
"Who'll get the blame?"

Still another factor in the prison melodrama is Corrections Corporation of
America, which has built a 2,300-bed prison on speculation in the Southern
California desert and is offering, in effect, to help the state solve its
overcrowding problem.

One of the Legislature's leading opponents of state prison construction,
Senate Democratic floor leader Richard Polanco, is openly championing the
private prison campaign. But the ever-powerful CCPOA is, for obvious
reasons, strongly opposed, and the Davis administration has given the
private prison firm a cold shoulder.

So how will all of this play out? Negotiations are under way among
legislators and Davis aides on a compromise -- similar to one last year
with Wilson -- that would add a few prison beds in return for more
nonprison treatment programs. The only certainty, however, is that as each
day passes, the moment the prisons overflow grows closer.