Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has pledged to root out corruption and waste in California's $5.7 billion prison system, on Tuesday named a former state and Sacramento County prosecutor to the job of top corrections watchdog.

Matthew Cate, 37, who for the past several years has prosecuted public corruption cases for the state attorney general's office, was chosen to head the Office of the Inspector General.

The move was immediately hailed by Democratic state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who does not always see eye to eye with the Republican governor.

"The governor's appointment of Matt Cate as inspector general demonstrates to me that he's serious about good oversight of California's prison and parole system," Lockyer said in a prepared statement. "Matt is one of the state's most gifted prosecutors and an ethical person of the highest integrity."

Cate, who is a Republican, must be confirmed by the state Senate. The job pays $123,255 a year.

Schwarzenegger earlier moved to weaken the independence of the Office of the Inspector General, calling it a "waste."

The 10-year-old agency, which had reported directly to the governor, performed audits and investigated wrongdoing, but many critics said it had proved ineffective in rooting out systemic corruption in the vast prison system.

As a cost-saving move in his first budget proposal, Schwarzenegger proposed cutting its funding and placing the agency directly under the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency that oversees corrections.

Critics in the Legislature and elsewhere said such a move would have rendered the agency toothless, and Schwarzenegger reversed course amid media reports and legislative hearings about prison waste and abuse.

Since that time, Schwarzenegger has asked the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento to investigate a riot at the state prison in Folsom and named former Gov. George Deukmejian to head a panel charged with recommending ways to reform corrections.

Cate, who could not be reached for comment, has been a supervising deputy attorney general since 1996.

As his appointment was announced, a federal judge in San Francisco, citing the "sorry history" of California's handling of prison disciplinary problems, gave a green light to the state's plan for independent oversight of prison guard misconduct.

The Los Angeles Times reported that U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson gave an initial go-ahead to using the inspector general to oversee investigations of excessive force and other alleged misconduct.