County Acts to Ease Jail Crowding : 3-Tier Bunks, Other Steps Ordered; Sheriff Has Doubts

The Board of Supervisors Wednesday ordered county officials to install three-tiered bunks in the County Jail, expand the honor farm for nonviolent prisoners and take other steps to relieve overcrowding at the Orange County Jail to comply with a federal judge’s directive.

Sheriff Brad Gates estimated it would take six months to implement the board’s order and said he was uncertain whether U.S. District Judge William P. Gray would accept the delay.

“He probably may not be very happy with waiting six months to get somebody moved off the floor” of the jail and into a bunk at the jail or another facility, Gates said.

The judge, on March 18, found Gates and the supervisors in criminal contempt for not complying with his 1978 order to improve conditions at the jail. Gray levied a $50,000 fine and said he would add additional fines of $10 per day for each prisoner forced to sleep on a mattress on the jail floor more than one night, starting May 17.

“I’m very concerned about what the judge is going to say” about the delay in reducing overcrowding at the jail, Gates said. In March, Gray said that “he wanted something done immediately to get those people off the floor,” the sheriff added.

Revised Proposals Adopted

The supervisors adopted a revised set of proposals drawn up by the task force they appointed after Gray’s March decision. The special panel included representatives of various county agencies that will have to carry out the recommendations.

An early plan to transfer up to 200 non-violent, low-risk inmates to the Los Pinos Forestry Camp near Lake Elsinore was dropped. Instead, the Probation Department was ordered to study the possibility of establishing a program for youthful offenders, aged 18 to 21, at the camp.

Larry J. Holms, acting county administrative officer and chairman of the task force, said the proposed youthful offender program could handle up to an additional 100 detainees. He said it would be an expansion of the current program at Los Pinos, where nearly 100 juveniles, aged 16 to 18, attend school and do conservation work in the Cleveland National Forest, site of the camp.

The presiding judge of the Orange County Juvenile Court, Betty Lou Lamoreaux, Supervisor Ralph Clark, and U.S. Forest Service Ranger R. Wayne Eddy had all expressed opposition to the original proposal to put as many as 200 inmates in the Los Pinos school gymnasium under the control of the Sheriff’s Department.

The critics were concerned about having adult inmates so close to the juveniles and about the possible harm to what is considered a good program to rehabilitate juveniles. The Forest Service wanted inmates who would perform work on government land and would not have to be kept behind bars around the clock.

The 14 actions ordered by the board included a direction to county agencies, including the Sheriff’s Department, to put up temporary housing facilities at the James A. Musick honor farm near El Toro to accommodate inmates who serve their jail time on weekends and those who work outside during the day and are jailed at night.

Gates said that Musick, which housed 189 men and 63 women Wednesday, would have to handle an additional 125 or more inmates on work furlough and approximately 200 weekenders. “At this point in time there is absolutely no place to put them,” Gates said.

‘A Touchy Thing’

The sheriff said the housing would have to be approved by the state Board of Corrections, and whether trailers or modular housing is used, “from my viewpoint, it’s going to be six months before we can do anything.”

Gates said the triple bunks that will create an additional 125 bed spaces at the main jail were ordered Wednesday, but he expressed concern about putting too many inmates in too little space.

“As you condense people into a small area . . . it becomes a touchy thing emotionally,” Gates said. “Our concern obviously goes up at that point with having problems with inmates. History has shown that when you start condensing people into small areas . . . tempers get hot and things happen.”

Still, the sheriff said, the supervisors had no alternatives, “unless you want to go out and grab a building somewhere in the county of Orange and say it’s a jail.”

He noted that studies of the jail system have said that the addition of facilities already approved “will only get us even” if all are finished on schedule in 1987. Forecasts of additional prisoners in the years ahead make it imperative to find a site for a new jail and to build it, Gates said.

Report Called Inadequate

Gates told the board that jails in cities in Orange County cannot be used to house County Jail inmates in many cases, but the board adopted Supervisor Harriett Wieder’s suggestion that the city jails be surveyed again.

Wieder on Monday labeled the task force’s revised report “inadequate” and directed the panel to consider other alternatives to ease overcrowding at the jail. She also persuaded the supervisors to have the task force accept an offer by the National Institute of Corrections in Boulder, Colo., to perform an analysis of the county jail system at no cost to the county.

Holms noted in both the report and in comments to the board that the panel’s recommendations were only a first step “in what will be a long and planned response” to the problem of overcrowding at the jail, which has a capacity of 1,191 inmates and Wednesday contained 1,866.

Other recommendations from the panel included having the County Parole Board see if it could expand its operations, directing the Probation Department to work with the courts to see if some non-violent inmates could be released from jail and put on probation earlier than at present and studying the possibility of expanding the alcohol treatment program to get additional inmates out of the jail and into another facility where they could be treated.

The board ordered an appropriation of $198,000 for additional bunks at the jail and at Musick. Added staff at the Theo Lacy Facility, in Orange, and Musick would cost a total of $600,000, according to Gates’ estimates, the report said.