The usual measures of bureaucratic success for a state government agency are bigger budgets, expanding influence and a higher profile for the person at the very top.

Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, lacks all but the last.

As 2012 begins, the 45-year-old former deputy attorney general finds himself steering the department's historic downsizing with a flat budget and a federal court looking over his shoulder.

Some people might see it as managing decline. Cate says it is a chance to remake California's penal system into a leaner, more focused institution.

"For the first time, maybe, there's a chance to run the prisons the way they were designed to be run," he said.

Lawmakers decided to lighten the department's workload through a "realignment" plan that sends more criminals to local jails instead of state prison, making Cate the face of a massive experiment that launched Oct. 1 but will take years to execute.

The goal: Reduce the inmate population at the state's 33 prisons from 144,000 in October to about 110,000 in about two years. As of Nov. 30, the state's prisoner head count was at about 137,000.

At the outset of Gov. Jerry Brown's comeback term in office this year, the Capitol swirled with rumors that Cate would be one of the first casualties of the administration's turnover.

Appointed to the job by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008, Cate inherited a deeply troubled department under court order to relieve overcrowding and a prison medical system under federal control.

As the department struggled to cut costs, a Wall Street Journal story last April argued that pay, job security and pension benefits made graduating from California's correctional officer academy better than a Harvard degree.

Cate was also in the crossfire of a bitter contract fight between Schwarzenegger and the guards' union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The GOP governor eventually declared impasse and imposed terms, putting Cate in the unenviable position of managing about 32,000 CCPOA members at war with his boss.

He nevertheless hung on when Democrat Brown took office.

"Usually, when the governor keeps on a senior appointee from the previous administration, it's a because of a need for continuity," said Dan Schnur, director of USC's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. "You don't want to start from square one unless you have to."

As realignment takes hold next year, Cate wants to remake the prison system "instead of taking the same model and just making it smaller." So look for him to press for more money for inmate education and rehabilitation. He wants to take back control over prison health care. He'll have to manage shrinking the 63,000- employee workforce.

Meanwhile, some local officials say their jails are filling up more quickly than expected with offenders who used to go to state prison.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican, recently told a Southern California television station that realignment is an ill-conceived "fool's errand" that undermines state sentencing policies.

"Given not only the various challenges, but all the stakeholders involved," Schnur said, "Cate might have the most politically challenging job in the state."

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Call Jon Ortiz, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1043.

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