California prison population California prison population. Even before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that California must drastically reduce its prison population, the state had begun taking steps to relieve severe overcrowding at the direction of a former actor-turned-governor who alternated roles between get-tough cop and social worker reformer. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger insisted in 2005 that the Department of Corrections be renamed to include "Rehabilitation" in its title. As the prisons' population swelled to an all-time high in 2006, the Republican governor declared a public safety emergency. He then used his emergency powers to begin transferring more than 10,000 inmates to private prisons in other states. He signed legislation last year that increased early release credits, made it more difficult to send ex-convicts back to prison for parole violations, and rewarded county probation departments for keeping criminals out of state prisons. Yet Schwarzen...