Prison Dogs

Here's something kind of strange going on in the Golden State.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has quietly built a new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison, prompting angry lawmakers who learned about the construction just this week to accuse the governor of hiding the project from the Legislature and the public.

Prison officials began construction in January after concluding it would cost $399,000 -- just under the $400,000 that would have required legislative approval, according to an administration document obtained Friday by The Chronicle.

The new death chamber is being finished as the state's use of capital punishment is under review by a federal court, and lawmakers have yet to authorize a larger construction project to revamp the prison's entire Death Row.

I've made it pretty clear over the years that I personally have no problem with capital punishment in principle, though clearly the process is highly flawed, and as such should be revised or at least reviewed. But this is more of a piece with Schwarzenegger's prison politics in general -- a tight clampdown on prisoners communicating with reporters, primarily, but clearly this further demonstrates a preference for secrecy and autocracy in managing the California prison system, one of the world's largest.

"To sneak a project like this through is just outrageous,'' said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, whose Marin County district includes San Quentin. "We will find out what kind of creative accounting they've done.''

Jim Tilton, Schwarzenegger's secretary for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said he had a good reason for not informing lawmakers -- he was unaware of the project.

....

Huffman said he was particularly angry because he recently held a meeting with Tilton about a proposal to rebuild the Death Row at San Quentin, and Tilton did not mention the new execution chamber.

Tilton said Friday that he had not been aware during his meeting with Huffman that a new chamber was being built.

Please. Capital punishment has always been an especially polarizing issue here, and particularly so since Michael Morales managed to get a last-minute reprieve last year, and death chamber anesthesiologists refused to participate in lethal injections. Anything to do with death row -- particularly the death chamber itself -- is going to be red-flagged for the guy in charge of all correction facilities and improvements. This is about as lame as the "MC Rove ate my homework" shuck-and-jive the DoJ and White House are pulling right now.

The question here is, why? The prison guards' union is politically powerful in this state, but they don't seem to have a hand in this. And again, the issue is essentially a 50-50 split here; it's not so disproportionately unpopular that the project would get squashed for political expediency, especially in the middle of literally hundreds of millions -- probably billions by the time it's all said and done -- of dollars of proposed renovations to an extremely overcrowded system.

If I had to make a guess -- and it appears that I do -- I would assume that Schwarzenegger simply decided to bypass the usual process of negotiations and concessions with the Democratic State Senate. He doesn't want to owe any favors to Don Perata and the rest of them, which is understandable, but not acceptable. Just like these lame-ass excuses.