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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ― California's prisons are so large that they are virtually unmanageable, officials who have led corrections systems in Pennsylvania, Maine and Washington state said Wednesday.

Their testimony came during the second day of a federal trial over whether crowded prisons have led to unconstitutionally poor medical and mental health care for California inmates. If a special three-judge panel decides that crowding is the primary problem, they plan a second trial next year that could lead to an order to release inmates.

"I don't know of another state, your honor, that has anything approaching this level of overcrowding. It just doesn't exist," testified Joseph Lehman, who headed corrections systems in Pennsylvania, Maine and Washington state.

About 156,300 inmates currently are in 33 adult prisons designed for fewer than 100,000. Attorneys representing inmates say the prisons should hold no more than about 110,000 inmates, not including another 11,000 inmates in conservation camps or privately run prisons in California and other states.

Jeffrey Beard, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, said he considers 3,300 inmates to be the upper limit for a manageable prison. Twenty-seven California prisons hold more than that number.

One California prison has more than 7,000 inmates; three have more than 6,000; 11 have more than 5,000; and nine have more than 4,000 inmates, according to the latest figures from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Besides their sheer size, none of the prisons was built to house so many inmates. Three prisons hold about 230 percent more inmates than they were designed for, and the others are close behind.

"My opinion is it's impossible to really do a good job with prisons that large," Beard said.

Controlling huge prisons means frequently locking inmates in their cells for long periods of time. That makes it difficult to provide proper medical and mental health treatment as well as letting inmates go to jobs, educational and rehabilitation programs, he said.

Attorneys representing the Schwarzenegger administration said during cross-examinations that conditions are improving. They said reducing crowding alone would not result in better medical or mental health care. But releasing thousands of inmates early would harm public safety.

Beard blamed California's get-tough drug laws and three-strikes sentencing laws since the 1970s for forcing more inmates into existing prisons.

"They went from being one of the most progressive systems in the country to one of the most overcrowded," Beard testified.

California's assault rate on inmates and employees is roughly 2.5 times that of Pennsylvania prisons. California's inmate suicide rate is double the national average. And California averaged 11.4 murders each year from 2000-2006, while Pennsylvania, with about 48,000 inmates, had three murders in total during the same period.

"You have a system that isn't safe," Beard testified.

Beard, who has 36 years of prison experience, and Lehman, with 35 years of experience, were both members of an expert panel convened by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2006-2007. The panel concluded that prison crowding has to be reduced before other reforms can work.

Besides creating management problems, Beard and Lehman testified that crowding is the main cause of medical and mental health care so poor that the federal courts have ruled it violates inmates' rights, sometimes leading to inmates' unnecessary deaths.

Jeanne Woodford, a former California corrections secretary and San Quentin Prison warden, recalled in testimony Wednesday that a makeshift dormitory at the California Rehabilitation Center in Riverside County was so crowded that it was hours before employees discovered that an inmate had been murdered in his bed in 2005.

"We just passed an initiative that gives chickens appropriate living space, and yet we permit conditions like this," Woodford said, referring to Proposition 2 approved by California voters Nov. 4.

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