Supervisors Delay Action on Crowding at County Jail

The Board of Supervisors Tuesday postponed action on ways to relieve overcrowding at the Orange County Jail after Supervisor Harriett Wieder said information presented by county agencies on the problem was “inadequate.”

Wieder said she was not satisfied that all alternatives had been considered before the special task force appointed by the board recommended transferring inmates to what is now a juveniles-only detention center at the Los Pinos Forestry Camp near Lake Elsinore.

Wieder suggested that the county counsel see if some County Jail prisoners could be held in municipal jails.

“I am kind of surprised and shocked we haven’t had that kind of information before we commit to spoiling a good program,” Wieder said, referring to the Probation Department’s Los Pinos program to rehabilitate teen-agers who run afoul of the law.

‘Inadequate’ Report

“I find the report inadequate,” Wieder said, after which the board decided to consider the problem of the overcrowded jail at its meeting Wednesday.

In a related development, an official of the U.S. Forestry Service, which owns the Cleveland National Forest where Los Pinos is located, said the agency would insist that no more than 100 more detainees be sent to Los Pinos.

But R. Wayne Eddy, district ranger for the area that includes the forest, said the agency would welcome 100 inmates who performed productive work, such as fighting fires or clearing brush, outside the facility.

One method of meeting Eddy’s concerns and those of supervisors worried about the effect of adult prisoners on the juvenile program at Los Pinos was mentioned in the report, which noted a proposal to establish a youthful-offender program at Los Pinos for nonviolent offenders aged 18 to 25.

Program’s Potential

The report said 96 “young adults under the age of 25 (preferably 18 through 21)” could be transferred to Los Pinos and put in a program “that has rehabilitation potential.” There are now 96 juveniles aged 16 to 18 at Los Pinos, the panel said.

Supervisor Ralph Clark repeated his concerns about using Los Pinos, noting that “I do not favor any mixing at all of the adults and youths” at the camp. On Monday, the presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, Betty Lou Lamoreaux, also repeated her criticism of putting adults at Los Pinos, saying she told the task force she thought it would be “very imprudent to decimate the very good program for a short-term, and possibly short-sighted, solution.”

The supervisors appointed the task force, which has representatives from several county agencies, after U.S. District Judge William P. Gray on March 18 found the board in contempt for not complying with his 1978 order to improve conditions at the jail.

Gray fined the board $50,000, which is being used to pay for a special master to monitor conditions at the jail in Santa Ana. He also added a fine of $10 per day for each prisoner forced to sleep on the floor for more than one day, but stayed imposition of that fine for 60 days.

The task force said last week it would not be able to meet Gray’s May 17 deadline to end overcrowding at the jail. The special master said that during one period in April the 1,191-capacity jail held up to 1,890 inmates at a time, with as many as 280 having to sleep on the floor for more than one night.

“I think we’ve got a very serious problem in responding to the mandates of the court,” Wieder said. She complained that the panel’s recommendations were presented to the board so late that there was insufficient time for supervisors to consider their “far-reaching consequences” before Tuesday’s meeting.

The draft report was completed last Friday, and the final version Monday evening. The panel said that even after transferring state and federal prisoners from the jail to state and federal facilities and after improving use of the jail medical wards in the wake of Gray’s order, the county needed approximately 400 additional beds, plus another 200 for weekend use.

It said 125 beds could be added to the jail through “triple bunking” and 76 more could be added to the James A. Musick honor farm near El Toro. The panel said the sheriff proposed transferring 392 prisoners in the main jail to the Theo Lacy jail facility in Orange, sending Theo Lacy inmates to Musick and moving Musick prisoners to a new site.

Temporary Measure

Although the panel said the Los Pinos gymnasium could hold 200 inmates, it stressed that using the forestry camp for adults would be only a temporary measure and that the adults would have to be separated from the juveniles, as required by law.

Eddy indicated that he would be satisfied if a program to treat youthful offenders was set up, so long as the number was limited to approximately 100 in addition to the nearly 100 juveniles currently at Los Pinos.

“We don’t want to throw roadblocks in the way,” Eddy said. “We just want to make sure the federal forest lands are protected.”

He noted that Los Pinos is in a recreational area that includes five popular campgrounds and said the Forest Service wanted inmates who were nonviolent and sufficiently trustworthy to be able to work outside the detention facility.

Public Benefits Sought

“Basically, we don’t want to allow a facility where they incarcerate people, where they’re just locked up and that’s it,” Eddy said. “We’re looking for a facility where we can get environmental work from the people there, where the Forest Service benefits and the public benefits from that facility.”

Eddy said the juveniles at Los Pinos, who attend a state-certified high school, have “done major work for us” in clearing brush, repairing picnic tables, putting up signs and performing similar work.

Because the juveniles are under 18, Eddy said, they have been barred from fighting fires. But youthful offenders 18 and over could be used for fire-suppression duties, which would be a “very useful resource for the public,” Eddy said.

The ranger said it would probably be relatively easy to add a youthful offender program to the current juvenile operation and might not require a lengthy environmental assessment.

Stop-Gap Measure

Larry J. Holms, the acting county administrative officer who wrote the panel report, said the recommendations were a “stop-gap, temporary fix” to comply with the federal order to improve jail conditions. Holms assured Supervisor Bruce Nestande that only nonviolent prisoners would be put at Los Pinos.

Holms also told Wieder that the task force had been told that municipal jails in the county could not take additional prisoners, but Wieder said the matter should be studied further.

She specifically mentioned Huntington Beach, where Police Chief Earle Robitaille said that for several years he has suggested that the county take over the city’s 76-bed jail. Robitaille said the Sheriff’s Department contended it would cost them too much to upgrade the facilities to meet state specifications on jails.

Robitaille said it would be impossible for his city’s jail, in its current condition, to accept prisoners from the County Jail who are serving terms up to one year. (Men and women convicted of crimes carrying penalties of more than one year are generally sentenced to state prisons, not county jails.)

Staff Too Small

“Our request has always been to have the county take over the jail as a regional jail,” Robitaille said. He said he lacked the staff to use the city jail as much more than a holding facility for men due to appear in court later in the day or the next day.

Seal Beach Police Chief Stacy Picascia said he, too, lacked staff to use his jail for long-term prisoners.

“It costs too much to staff on a full-time basis in relation to the prisoners we book and release, as opposed to ones we hold overnight or would hold for an extended period of time,” Picascia said.

The task force said the problem of jail overcrowding will be eased considerably once a work-furlough project is established at Theo Lacy, probably in another year, and when an additional facility to take in men bound for jail and hold those about to be released is finished by mid-1987. It said the Theo Lacy project would house an additional 180 men, and the intake and release center 384. In addition, the county is still looking for a site for a new jail.