Jeanne Woodford quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 2014
Jeanne Woodford … agreed, saying health care for former inmates should be viewed as a public safety issue. “I think one only has to look at when AIDS became an issue. There were people leaving prison HIV-positive or with full-blown AIDS and there was no treatment in the community, so they would violate their parole on purpose to get medical care,” she said, adding that recidivism among those populations declined once cities started offering more treatment.
Mirkarimi wants to sign up inmates for health coverage
California prison hunger strike appears headed for stalemate
Jeanne Woodford quoted in Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2013
“Being rational seems to have left this debate,” said Jeanne Woodford, who ran California’s vast prison system under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and now teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law. “It’s people who have dug their heels in on both sides.”
Gov. Jerry Brown calls on feds to give up oversight of prisons
Jeanne Woodford quoted in Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2013
Former state prisons chief Jeanne Woodford disputed the governor’s assertion and said she worried that without federal intervention, the governor and Legislature would find it easier to cut funding for improvements such as new healthcare facilities. “Without court oversight, resources tend to get taken away,” said Woodward, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law
California leads the nation in wrongful convictions
Jeanne Woodford, Rebecca Silbert, Andrea Russi quoted in The People’s Vanguard of Davis, Oct. 25, 2012
“This research shows that our criminal justice system makes mistakes more often than we think With 200 wrongful convictions and counting, just since 1989, it isclear that our justice system is deeply flawed,” said Jeanne Woodford.
“The project’s final analysis will include the time, money and resources wasted on all cases that were overturned and dismissed due to misconduct and legal errors, including those where innocent people are wrongfully charged,” said Rebecca Silbert.
“We owe it to everyone involved, including the victims, to identify problems and work towards a more fair and accountable justice system,” said Andrea Russi.
A similar article appeared in The New Republic.
Barry Krisberg, Jeanne Woodford Urge Reform of Second-Strike Policy
San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 2011 by Marisa Lagos
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/31/MN0F1KFC2T.DTL&type=printable
“We’re missing the significance of the second strike,” said UC Berkeley’s Barry Krisberg, director of research and policy at the school’s Institute on Law and Social Policy. “It is having an enormous impact on our prison population, and many second-strikers are serving more time than third-strikers, but when people talk about the policy of reforming three strikes, nobody wants to touch the second strike.”
Jeanne Woodford, a former Corrections Department chief … said the “three strikes” law has unquestionably helped drive the state’s prison crowding and spending problems…. “Some of these guys are literally serving 60, 70 years—more time than three-strikers,” she said. “The bottom line is that we really do need to look at our sentences. They are just so all over the place that people could commit a very serious crime and get less time than a second-striker who did something far less serious. To be a deterrent, the sentencing system has to be consistent.”
Jeanne Woodford, Franklin Zimring Discuss Move to End Death Penalty
Catholic San Francisco, June 21, 2011 by George Raine
http://www.catholic-sf.org/news_select.php?newsid=16&id=58697
“Just imagine asking public servants to wake up every day and have them go to work planning to kill somebody,” said Woodford, who now leads a campaign to eliminate capital punishment in the nation. “It takes a toll on you. You begin to realize how much you are affected by participating in an execution. You have spent 30 to 60 days planning to kill somebody. How can that not affect you?”
Frank Zimring said, “There is in American history a long tradition of prison wardens who identify with the humanity and aspirations of the prisoners. You also have a divide between administrators who saw this as an adversarial relationship and administrators who saw it as a branch of human services, and Jeanne Woodford came from the psychology of human services. It’s a great tradition.”
Jeanne Woodford, Barry Krisberg Approve SCOTUS Ruling on Prison Overcrowding
-Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2011 by Steve Lopez
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0525-lopez-getoutofjail-20110523,0,1002589.column
“Prison is for seriously violent individuals,” said Jeanne Woodford, the former corrections chief who’s now with the Earl Warren Institute…. In her opinion, we incarcerate “many more prisoners than is necessary for the safety of the public.” But Woodford and others said the Supreme Court decision is cause for hope, because it forces the state to address the situation.
-Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2011 by Jeanne Woodford and Barry Krisberg
http://lat.ms/kvUXhy
Jammed prisons offer no chance for education, mental health or rehabilitation programs. And they can be breeding grounds for more violent crime and victimization…. The court’s ruling, far from being a threat to public safety, is an opportunity to reform the broken California penal system, which could mean better outcomes for all of us.
Jeanne Woodford, Franklin Zimring Fault Schwarzenegger’s Prison Policies
The Associated Press, May 24, 2011 by Don Thompson
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/may/24/schwarzenegger-had-mixed-record-on-prison/?print=1
“My frustration was that the governor just didn’t want to address sentencing reform or implement the kind of policies that made sense,” said Jeanne Woodford, who briefly served as Schwarzenegger’s corrections secretary in 2006 before abruptly resigning. “(By the end), he came to see that criminal justice reform was absolutely crucial.”
“In the first two years you have reform appointments made, you have moderation in rhetoric and you have some notion of trying to reintroduce reform,” said Frank Zimring, a University of California, Berkeley law professor who has studied California prisons for nearly 30 years. “Everyone was waiting for the reform agenda to get specific, and it didn’t…. The governor’s political capital never got invested in that reform.”
Jeanne Woodford Opposes Death Penalty
KQED-FM, May 16, 2011 Host Scott Shafer
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201105160900
“I think that it’s time to get rid of the death penalty. When you look at the number of people who are on death row and the money that we spend, and the fact that we execute very few people … it’s just an expensive punishment that we don’t carry out and ends up being a false promise to victims.”
Jeanne Woodford Says Housing Inmates in County Jails Saves Money
San Jose Mercury News, January 13, 2011 by Karen de Sá
http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county/ci_17091138?nclick_check=1
“The cost of sending people to state prison for a week or a month is huge,” said Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin State Prison and now a senior fellow at UC Berkeley. At state reception centers, she noted, many of the same medical tests, psychological screening and caseworker reports done in the county jails are repeated.