Last Updated 5:47 am PST Thursday, December 13, 2007 Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A4
One inmate's release date was so badly miscalculated, it was 643 days off. Another stayed 366 days too long before the blunder was discovered. A third prisoner was slated for 243 extra days in the joint before the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation realized the goof.
All three inmates have since been released, according to a spokesman for a union that filed a lawsuit Wednesday to get the state to correct prisoners' release dates. The mistakes came to light in a sampling undertaken in August by the corrections agency, which now says it miscalculated sentences on some 33,000 inmates and that an unknown number of them are in line to get out of prison earlier than anticipated.
The problem came to the state's attention when three appellate court cases questioned the prison system's calculation of good-time credits for inmates. Under the law, inmates may receive up to 50 percent off their terms on convictions for non-violent offenses and 15 percent for violent crimes. The 33,000 cases involve inmates improperly credited on non-violent offenses, according to the court cases as well as the union's lawsuit, filed Wednesday by Service Employees International Union Local 1000.
In one respect, the botched sentences could be good news for the prison department. If correcting the miscalculations adds up to a significant number of releases, it could ease pressure on the state. Inmates rights' lawyers have asked for a population cap, claiming that prison overcrowding prevents the state from providing constitutional levels of medical and mental health care. A three-judge court is scheduled to hear the matter Feb. 6.
"It is possible that by recalculating good-time credits based on the criteria laid out by the courts, we may see a reduction in the inmate population based on those court orders," CDCR spokesman Seth Unger said.
SEIU 1000 brought its suit on behalf of case records analysts, the prison employees charged with manually sifting through the paper files that follow inmates into the prison system. It is the analysts' duty to determine a release date based on the judge's sentence as well as other factors, such as an inmate's disciplinary record and program performance behind bars.
According to union officials, staff shortages among the records workers are so acute that they have not been able to go through the files. At least 99 positions are short, the officials say, and the state needs to get on the hiring stick to fix the mess.
"They knew there was a problem," said Marc Bautista, SEIU 1000's vice president in charge of organizing and representation. "The challenge of it is, who's going to do the work? You can't just hire case record analysts. It takes years to teach them how to read files and apply laws."
Bautista said the staff shortages are sure to linger next year. Filling vacancies and creating new slots has to take place through the budget process, Bautista said, and that won't be finalized until July 1 at the earliest.
"And that's a best-case analysis," Bautista said.
Karen DeVoll, a case records analyst at the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, said she participated in the August sampling. She said in four of the five cases she examined, the inmates were serving too much time, but only by three to seven days.
Still, DeVoll said in an interview Wednesday, "We need more staffing. We need more resources so we can implement (the law correctly). It's going to save the taxpayers money." It costs about $120 a day to house the average California prisoner.
The 33,000 inmates up for recalculated sentences were all convicted on at least two counts in the same case, one of which was a violent offense and one of which was not. But they still got only 15 percent time credit off their sentence for the non-violent offense when they could have received up to 50 percent.
Scott Kernan, the corrections agency's chief deputy secretary for adult operations, said the August sample looked at 600 cases. He said the sample suggested recalculating the 33,000 cases could result in some 600 fewer inmates sleeping in prison beds by the beginning of the year.
But it's still too early to get a read on the longer-term impact of the recalculations on the prison population, he said.
"Some of these guys are doing 20 years," Kernan said. "They're going to have their recalculations, but it's only going to take two months off their sentences when their release dates come up. We're prioritizing it so that the inmates closest to release will be the ones who get the priority recalculations."
Unger, the CDCR spokesman, said prison officials have been working on the recalculations "for months."
"We've authorized staff to work overtime on the project, and we're in the process of identifying the resources to bring in the additional case records staff," Unger said.
Bautista, however, said he is not aware of anybody working overtime except to keep up with an existing workload. He added that he is not aware of the department devoting any resources to the problem since it conducted its samplings in August.
"There's been nothing since," Bautista said.
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