.Lovelle Mixon, who killed four Oakland police officers over the weekend, was a typical example of a parolee who was lost in a dysfunctional state parole system, experts said Monday.

From state Attorney General Jerry Brown to academics who have studied the state's sprawling corrections apparatus, nobody had kind words for what Brown described as a broken parole machine.

Brown, Oakland's mayor from 1998 to 2006, called Monday for a strategic partnership of state and local authorities to work on a system that would attach satellite-based positioning devices on dangerous parolees in Oakland. At any one time, some 3,000 parolees live in the city…

Every year, about 7,000 state inmates are released on parole to Alameda County, representing about 5 percent of the roughly 138,000 inmates released on parole statewide each year, statistics show.

Though the sheer number of parolees in the county concerns many, it's the number of parolees that end up back in prison for either committing a new crime or violating terms of their parole that prove the state's parole system is broken, studies conducted over the past decade show.

If Alameda County parolees return to prison as often as they do throughout the entire state, then of the 7,000 parolees released last year, about 4,600, or 66 percent, will be back behind bars by 2011. In Contra Costa County, 1,927 parolees were released back into the community last year, the numbers show…

by Jerry Powers, chief probation officer for Stanislaus County and president of the Chief Probation Officers of California.

True reform of our overcrowded and ineffective state corrections system cannot be accomplished by spending billions on bricks and mortar, or releasing tens of thousands of offenders early.

The citizens and taxpayers of our state are being shortchanged by shortsighted approaches that do not address the underlying causes.

The current approach is akin to waiting until the patient develops pneumonia instead of treating the cough in its early stages…

Lawsuits and public hearings, Austin said in the declaration, also "can be expected to delay the process for years." "Any time you try to build your way out of these situations, it usually doesn't work very well," Austin said in an interview. Beyond concrete and steel, the corrections agency also is trying to alter the prison population by revamping the parole system…