Rapid Overcrowding of Prison Predicted

The $139-million Otay Mesa state prison will be overcrowded almost as soon as it opens and will offer little help in relieving California’s overburdened prison system, the superintendent of the planned prison said Wednesday.

Reginald L. Pulley, who has directed the planning of the medium-security facility since 1984, said that inmates will almost immediately have to be assigned two to a cell to absorb the overflow of inmates from other state prisons, where they are sometimes housed in gymnasiums. State standards for medium-security prisons call for one prisoner per cell.

“Hopefully, our facility will not become so overcrowded that it becomes an operational problem,” Pulley told members of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. “But I don’t anticipate a time in the foreseeable future when we will not be double-celling.”

The Otay Mesa prison is scheduled to open in August, 1987, adding 2,200 beds to California’s penal system. But construction has yet to begin at the site, 12 miles east of the coast and two miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The prison is part of a program to build 10 prisons with 23,000 beds by 1990.

But the prison population will grow so quickly that the penal system will still be more than 7,500 beds short, Pulley predicted.

“At some point, we (society) must look at this problem and see if prisons are necessary, these types of prisons,” Pulley said. “Are there other alternatives?”

Robert Gore, assistant director of the state Department of Corrections, agreed with Pulley’s assessment that the Otay Mesa prison would eventually have to resort to putting two prisoners in each cell, but differed by saying the prison would fill up slowly and overcrowding would not become an immediate problem.

“We know that double-celling will happen at some point, but we are not sure when,” Gore said. “Since the facility will not open for several more months and the incoming inmate population trends fluctuate so often, it is difficult to say what the situation will be then.” (The first 500 inmates are scheduled to move in by October, 1986, although the official opening is scheduled for August, 1987.)

If current trends continue, California’s inmate population by 1990 will be 40% higher than the penal system’s capacity, Gore said. Since February, 144 more prisoners per week have been incarcerated than released from California prisons, he added.

He said the 1,000-bed, maximum-security prison in Tehachapi, which opened in October, has already been equipped with two bunks in some of the cells.

Thomas Gitchoff, a San Diego State University professor of criminal justice, said overcrowded prisons and double-celling of inmates perpetuates the cycle of violence that is inherent in prisons.

“Invariably, when you double-cell inmates, one person takes control,” Gitchoff said. “They (prisoners) learn that might makes right, and when they come out of prison they come out with this message. It only escalates the barbarism in the prisons and the crime on the streets.”