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.”

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.”

-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.

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.”

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.”

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.