EDITORIAL JAIL BROKE NEITHER BACA NOR ARNOLD CAN CORRECT CORRECTIONS.

OVERCROWDED and out of control, Los Angeles County's jails and California's prisons are a mess. And neither Sheriff Lee Baca nor Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have the will or the power to clean them up.

For Baca, the local jail system goes from bad to worse, as does his response to it.

For years, the jails have been bursting at the seams. In 2002, due to budget problems and a federal court order prohibiting overcrowding, Baca began releasing nonviolent criminals after they served as little as 10 percent of their sentences.

The results for L.A. County have been disastrous. Of the nearly 150,000 inmates Baca has let out of jail, nearly 16,000 have been rearrested or charged with new crimes -- and that's only a fraction, to be sure, of those who have actually committed new crimes, since most don't get caught. Nearly 3,500 of the repeat offenders have been charged with violent offenses -- 16 of them with murder.

Worse yet, word is out on the street that if you do the crime in L.A. County, you won't do the time. As a result, criminals increasingly plead guilty and seek jail time -- knowing that with early release, their punishment will be less onerous than community service or probation.

Complicating matters, critics have complained that the sheriff's practice of making some inmates serve out more of their sentence than others was unfair.

In May, the county Board of Supervisors made the common-sense suggestion that a criminal's prior record should be a factor in deciding who serves how much of a term, with repeat offenders staying behind bars longer than first-timers. And prosecutors argued that matters not related to the inmates' conduct -- such as jail staffing and capacity -- were influencing decisions.

In response, Baca now proposes what might be the least logical of all possible solutions: treating all inmates the same, with the goal of making them serve a whopping 25 percent of their sentence.

So now in Baca's jails, those who commit more serious crimes repeatedly will get the same early release as those who commit less serious crimes just once. And virtually no one can expect to serve more than a quarter of his sentence -- deterrence be damned.

After all, determining which criminals are the most dangerous would be awfully judgmental, and we can't have that. ``We aren't going to make the moral decision,'' says Assistant Sheriff Paul K. Tanaka.

Which means we now have an amoral jail system -- and that hardly seems like an improvement.

But the situation is arguably worse at the state level.

California's prisons are also overcrowded, and their deplorable conditions have a lot to do with the state's high recidivism rate. The prisons are also under the supervision of court-appointed monitors due to a history of neglecting sick and mentally ill inmates. A deeply flawed discipline system protects abusive guards. And the juvenile-justice system has been denounced by experts across the country.

Although Schwarzenegger spoke out against the code of silence and other abuses in state prisons back in 2005, he's learned the hard way that the prison guards union is not to be messed with. He's also mindful that the union has yet to endorse anyone in this fall's gubernatorial campaign, and it's reserved $5 million in TV airtime to support its eventual candidate.

Thus, instead of the hard-hitting reforms the governor once proposed -- such as cracking down on abuses and contracting out less-expensive, private detention facilities for nonviolent criminals -- Schwarzenegger is now trying to earn the union's affection.

He is pushing a controversial $6 billion plan to build yet more prisons -- staffed with union guards, of course -- and will be negotiating the guards' contract during the height of election season.

What Baca and Schwarzenegger have in common is an inability to overcome a crushing status quo. Baca is seemingly unwilling to call for the structural reforms and law changes that would bring sanity to the county jails, while Schwarzenegger lacks the political muscle to overcome the prison guards union that is, by all accounts, a major part of the problem.

What's going on in L.A.'s and California's corrections systems is a disgrace, but one that suits the political establishment just fine.

And nothing short of a major public outcry against this unjust, dangerous status quo -- the inhumanity of mistreating inmates and the danger of hardened criminals returning to the streets -- will give our leaders the fortitude to do something about it.