Prison Oversight Failed to Keep Pace With Explosive Growth

Even as Corcoran State Prison was coming apart at the seams, the state watchdog team that finally visited the prison in 1993 didn’t raise any questions about staged fights or allegations of brutality.

Instead, the Inspector General’s Office asked about inmate showers, linens and underwear. Were the cells clean and well lighted? Did the toilets flush properly?

The squad of inspectors left, giving the prison a clean bill of health.

That team represented the only systemwide gatekeeper watching over the nation’s largest prison system, a sprawling octopus of 33 lockups that now houses 158,000 criminals.

Underfunded and understaffed, the watchdog team had a narrow mandate: inspect prisons to ensure that inmates were properly clothed, fed and exercised.

State officials, busy in the headlong rush to build and staff more and more penitentiaries in the past decade, concede that they are only now coming to grips with the need to better police their nearly $4-billion-a-year enterprise.

“There was not any expansion of internal affairs capacity when all that growth took place,” said Cal Terhune, Department of Corrections director.

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Three years ago, the state Legislature established a new Inspector General’s Office with expanded enforcement powers. Those include the authority to oversee the department’s internal affairs unit, which also has been beefed up to better handle excessive force and other misconduct complaints.

Terhune and aides to Gov. Pete Wilson said the overhauled system is working.

But critics contend that the efforts fall short of the sweeping reforms needed to ensure that the rampant violence of Corcoran--where seven inmates were shot dead by guards and 43 others wounded in recent years--never happens again.

To avoid a repeat, some lawmakers and penal experts say, the Department of Corrections must shake up its culture. The insular world of California’s prisons, they say, must treat whistle-blowers like heroes, not as outcasts--as they were at Corcoran. Guards must be encouraged and rewarded for reporting misconduct.

“We’ve had an institution that’s gone amok,” said state Sen. Richard G. Polanco (D-Los Angeles), chairman of a joint legislative committee on prisons. “Each and every one of those officers had the duty to stop it, then bring it to their superiors.”

To Polanco it was “mind boggling” that the Corrections Department and Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren could conduct investigations last year and find only isolated incidents of misconduct at Corcoran--even though a federal grand jury would soon indict eight officers on civil rights violations arising from the shooting death of an inmate at the prison.

“It tells me that there’s an inherent problem with this department,” he said.

Lungren, who disputes that his investigators could have done more, acknowledged that the department’s internal policing never kept pace with the massive prison buildup.

“I’m not satisfied we’ve had the strongest internal affairs operation over the years,” he said. Without spelling out details, Lungren said he would support “a strong proposal for strengthening the hand of internal affairs on the model of some of the larger police departments.”

The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, has an internal affairs staff of 179 for 12,500 employees, a ratio of 1 to 70. By comparison, corrections had a full-time internal affairs staff of 43 for 43,000 employees--or 1 to 1,000--until last year.

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Terhune said the state has been pumping money into the revamped internal affairs unit to nearly double staffing but said there is more to do.

In the wake of Corcoran, state lawmakers expanded the duties of the inspector general, who now has the authority to audit wardens--but only those who have been on the job for five years--and can delve into abuse allegations.

The new inspector, former Pomona Police Chief Lloyd Wood, came from outside the Corrections Department. But Wood’s office just got its first full-time investigators this year.

“It got off to a very slow start,” said Wood, attributing part of the problem to his limited budget of $250,000 this past year.

Some longtime department observers describe the reforms as token steps and are particularly critical of the internal affairs unit because it remains part of Corrections.

“It’s something like putting Col. Sanders in charge of a chicken coop,” said state Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Chino), who heads a special committee on prisons. “They are investigating themselves, and I say an independent investigation is needed.”

With that goal in mind, Ayala has proposed fully merging the inspector general’s operation with internal affairs and having the new independent agency report directly to the governor. His measure was approved by the Senate and is pending in the Assembly.

Wilson opposes Ayala’s bill as unnecessary but has proposed spending an additional $2.6 million in the next budget year on internal investigations.

Richard Ehle, a former Oakland police captain who heads the new internal affairs unit, said that his team is reviewing about 1,000 complaints of employee misconduct such as excessive force and sexual harassment--more than double the expected caseload. The mounting caseload comes as FBI investigators have expanded criminal probes at Corcoran and two other prisons.

“We have to ensure that the organization is run well and we police ourselves well,” Ehle said. “That’s the only way we’ll have public confidence.

“If you don’t have that confidence, you go through the kind of hell we’re going through now.”

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Times staff writer Mark Arax contributed to this report.