CHINO, CA - For the first time in years, inmates at the California Institution for Men will soon be living in a gymnasium that is being converted to hold 155 people.

The move is an attempt to deal with the prison's population crisis, which has reached severe levels of overcrowding in recent weeks.

"I see this as a desperation move," said Martin Aroian, president of the CIM chapter of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. "This isn't the ideal place for inmate beds, so I don't think the warden would re-open the gym for housing if he wasn't desperate for space."

The Chino prison's total inmate population is 6,533, according to the department's latest figures -- 212 percent of the facility's designed capacity.

It's also an increase from the 6,375 inmates reportedly being held at the prison in the first week of 2006, according to data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The population crunch is particularly difficult for the prison to deal with right now, since dozens of inmates have had to be moved out of their cells so critical repairs to the infrastructure can be completed, said CIM spokesman Lt. Tim Shirlock.

"We do what we have to do" to find room for the inmates, Shirlock said. The prison has no control over how many new prisoners are sent to CIM each day.

The overcrowding at CIM is symptomatic of the situation in the state's prison system at large.

Currently, there are 171,000 prisoners in California's institutions, nearly twice the number they were built to hold. The total is 4.8 percent higher than it was this time last year.

CDCR officials hope to eventually reduce the inmate population by better preparing prisoners for their return to society.

To that end, the department plans to offer more educational and job-training programs at California prisons, said Jeanne Woodford, the department's undersecretary, at a recent seminar in Los Angeles.

But those reforms will take time and effort, she cautioned.

"For over two decades, the mission of the California Department of Corrections had been punishment," Woodford said. "You can't unring that bell by simply adding the word `rehabilitation.' ... The reality is it will take many years to bring rehabilitation to 100 percent of California's prison population."