Overcrowding at County Jails Forces Release of More Criminals

Squeezed between a law-and-order society and a shortage of public funds, San Diego County’s jails are filled--forcing police, jailers and judges to allow increasingly dangerous criminals back on the streets with little or no punishment, local government officials and criminal justice authorities say.

More than five years after a Superior Court judge ordered an end to overcrowding in the Central Jail downtown, that task is done. But three regional jails, a women’s jail and a rural jail camp, built to help ease the overcrowding downtown, are themselves now overflowing with inmates. And despite the increased use of alternatives to jail, county officials say they can’t keep up with the demand for cells brought on by expanded city police forces and stiffened sentencing laws that are the result of the public’s desire to be tougher on crime.

Police here complain that the overcrowded jails force them to release too many misdemeanor offenders on the streets without bringing them to jail. Most of those who are brought in are let go within hours--many within minutes--because there is no room for them. Ninety-seven percent of suspects booked into the Central Jail on misdemeanor charges never make it to a cell.

Judges, meanwhile, contend that the criminal justice system becomes a mockery when suspected criminals, released on their promise to appear in court, are not jailed after failing to show for a hearing. Others, convicted of crimes from drunk driving to burglary, spend so little time behind bars that jail has ceased to be a deterrent for them, judges say.

County supervisors, convinced that the problem is bad and growing worse, on Dec. 17 agreed to build a 500-bed jail and a 350-bed honor camp. But the tougher question--finding the money to pay for that construction--remains to be decided, and even after the money is found it will be at least five years before a new jail is opened. By then, county officials say, still more cells will be needed.

Today, the county’s jails house an average of 2,600 inmates each day--900 more than they were built for. An additional 675 inmates are sentenced to six minimum-security honor camps, which are run by the Probation Department and take only as many prisoners as they are designed for. In the next 20 years, current trends would more than triple the shortage of jail beds to 2,856.

So far, the increased crowding has not meant more violence in the jails. The newer jails in Vista, El Cajon and Chula Vista are roomier than the older, prison-like downtown jail and can handle almost double their designed capacity without major problems. But that level of crowding has been reached and exceeded, and officials warn that more inmates cannot safely be fit into the space.

“It’s very much like a rubber band,” said Asst. Sheriff Clifford Powell, who supervises the jail system. “You can keep stretching it and stretching it and you never know when it’s going to happen, but it’s going to go bang.”

While the population of San Diego County doubled during the last 25 years, the jail population quintupled.

County jails house suspected criminals awaiting trial, and convicted criminals sentenced to terms of one year or less. Those sentenced to longer terms are transferred to state prisons.

San Diego County is not alone in its battle against jail overcrowding. Nationwide, counties are rushing to build new jails and are trying more novel alternatives to incarceration. In California, jails built for 38,228 inmates are housing an average of 48,555, according to officials with the state Department of Corrections. Although voters approved jail construction bond issues in 1982 and 1984 providing for thousands of beds, officials statewide say it would take another billion dollars to build the beds now needed.

At least a dozen California counties are under court orders to relieve overcrowding. In Orange County, the county government is fined $10 for every inmate who spends a night on a mattress on a jailhouse floor. In Los Angeles, which has the nation’s largest local jail system with more than 17,000 inmates, some prisoners slept on the roof of the main jail until more cells were recently made available.

Yolo County Supervisor Betsy Marchand, chairwoman of a statewide committee on criminal justice administration, calls the problem the “state-city sandwich.” The state Legislature approves laws defining new crimes or toughening penalties for existing crimes, and the cities increase the size of their police departments to enforce those laws. The result: more people in jail and more people processed through the courts, both of which are the responsibility of the counties.

“It’s a problem in every single county in the state that I’m aware of,” Marchand said. “If they have a new facility or have been able to expand a little bit, then they have other problems. But most every new facility I’m aware of was overcrowded the day it was opened.”

That has certainly been true in San Diego County, at least since 1960, when the Central Jail opened with about 520 prisoners. Using state guidelines that require a certain amount of space and services for each inmate, the Central Jail was designed for 400 inmates. It was later remodeled and expanded to hold 730.

But as the only county jail in a rapidly growing region, Central Jail throughout the 1960s and early 1970s became more and more crowded. In 1976, when the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that conditions in the jail amounted to an unconstitutional level of cruel and unusual punishment, the facility was holding almost 1,200 inmates. And at times before Superior Court Judge James Focht ruled in the ACLU’s favor in 1980 and ordered the population reduced to 750, the downtown jail was stuffed with as many as 1,500 prisoners.

In an attempt to relieve that crowding, the county has built the Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee, which opened in 1977, and new regional jails in Vista (1979), Chula Vista (1982) and El Cajon (1983). The county’s Descanso and Viejas honor camps were turned over to the sheriff in 1981.

But now those jails, too, are overcrowded. With a combined state-rated capacity of 964, the five newer jails have been housing twice that number. In Vista, South Bay and El Cajon, cells built for one inmate now sleep two, and other prisoners sleep on bunks and mattresses crowded into common areas. At night, inmates without cells must use toilets inside other inmates’ cells, an intrusion more safely done in a suburban home than a jail housing criminals. On weekends, when crowding is at its worst, the noise in a tank of 80 or more inmates can be thunderous.

Because the jails are staffed only according to their designed capacities, deputies are hard pressed to provide adequate supervision, and the jail’s services are stretched. In South Bay, for instance, the jail designed for 196 often has more than 500 inmates. That means the laundry, the kitchen, the property rooms and recreation areas are used for more than twice their intended number. One counselor is on hand to serve all the inmates, and he spends most of his time classifying prisoners to determine where they would best be placed. The jail lacks the 24-hour nursing care that is standard for a facility its size and relies instead on paramedics for emergencies.

The Vista jail has inadequate space for medical examinations, treatment and patient care, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Sick female patients cannot be segregated, and the female inmates have restricted access to the library, medical services and outdoor recreation because to get to these services they must be taken through the jail control rooms and male housing modules. The El Cajon jail cannot accept homosexuals or inmates with medical problems because there is no way to separate them from the general population.

Alex Landon, the local attorney who pressed the ACLU’s successful suit over the conditions in the Central Jail, said the problems in the regional jails are not yet as serious. But Landon said the absence of a true crisis should not lead the county to allow conditions to deteriorate further.

“If it’s just a matter of double-celling, that’s one thing,” Landon said. “But when it gets to 500 inmates (in the South Bay jail, built for 196), then you’re talking about a situation that’s creating an unconstitutional atmosphere. Some of the comments being made now put the county on notice that they should be doing something to bring on a change. If they choose not to, they may be buying themselves a lawsuit.”

Because the county has neither the money nor the desire to build an unlimited supply of jail beds, the focus here, as elsewhere, has been on developing alternatives to jail that will help keep the the number of inmates down.

Police officers in the field are encouraged to issue citations to misdemeanor offenders who promise to appear in court, and almost none of those who are brought to jail on misdemeanor charges stay long enough to occupy a cell. Felony suspects are sent through what is known as the Central Intake Program, where workers use a standard series of questions about the inmates’ past, their employment and their ties to San Diego to develop a point score that is relayed by phone to judges, who have the power to order the suspects released on their own recognizance.

Once criminals have been convicted, they can be sentenced to one of the six county honor camps, be put on work furlough, where they can work during the day and spend their nights in jail, or on work release, where they are free but must report to the jails for a certain length of time for public service work. They can also be placed in alcohol education programs or on probation with intensive supervision.

But judges complain that budget cuts in the Probation Department have made it difficult for overburdened probation officers to supervise their clients, and the other alternatives are under-funded and often have long waiting lists. That leaves outright release or jail time as the most practical result of a conviction, with little in between.

A study of the jail system completed in May for the county attributed much of the overcrowding to what is known as “over-classification”--the practice of housing inmates in cells that are more secure than are needed. The study, by the Berkeley-based Institute for Law and Policy Planning, also said the county had a relatively high bail schedule, a large number of public drunks and drunk-drivers in jail, inconsistent charging practices among local police agencies and a lack of trust among judges in the recommendations of the Central Intake Program.

The county accepted 11 of the institute’s suggestions, enough to eventually free more than 300 maximum security beds so they can be used for more serious offenders. The suggestions ranged from extending the Central Intake Program countywide to expanding the use of work-release programs. In addition, the county has begun a detailed study of the jail population in an effort to find the bottlenecks and clear them.

Alan Kalmanoff, executive director of the institute, compares the jails to a flood-control system in which a series of valves controls the flow of water. In the jails, Kalmanoff says, inmates are the water, and the valves are the various points in the system where prisoners can be released or kept in custody.

“One valve has a judge on it, one has a sheriff on it, another has program resources, like information that’s available to know if someone is releasable early,” Kalmanoff said. “If the snow melts quickly, you can open some of the valves and let the water out so it doesn’t flood. And you can let out the inmates with just a few days left on their sentences.”

In San Diego, Kalmanoff said, “there is the potential for controlling overcrowding” by using still more alternatives to jail. Among the options suggested by Kalmanoff but rejected by the county were sentencing inmates to their homes, where they could be monitored electronically, and allowing the quick release of more inmates who have outstanding warrants.

“It’s a local decision, politically,” Kalmanoff said. “It seems to me it’s the sheriff’s reading of what the voters are asking for. The sheriff (John Duffy) has made a decision to structure the (work-release) program so that people who receive a 30- or 45-day sentence are going to do time, they’re going to hear the door close behind them rather than doing work out in the community.”

Duffy said he believes the county has used every reasonable alternative available.

“If someone can tell us some more, we’d like to hear about them,” he said. “We don’t think there are any more. We are kicking people out the back door of the jail as fast as San Diego P.D. puts them in. In some of those cases, it’s probably just not in the public interest to do that.

“I’ve been on at least a dozen committees on what to do about the overcrowded jail. Inevitably, a big play is made of alternatives: ‘Don’t put people in jail. Don’t put ‘em in jail for victimless crimes. Don’t put ‘em in jail for drunk driving. Don’t put ‘em in jail unless they’re violent criminals. Don’t leave ‘em in jail.’ You don’t hear that anymore. I think the public doesn’t want to hear it anymore.”

After years of futile argument, Duffy has finally persuaded the county Board of Supervisors to build a 500-bed pretrial jail, where offenders will be booked and kept at least until they are arraigned. Along with the construction of a 350-bed honor camp, the new jail is expected to help relieve overcrowding and will allow the sheriff to convert the Central Jail into a facility for sentenced prisoners only. A 296-bed expansion of the Vista jail has already been funded and is scheduled to open in 1988.

The board tentatively agreed Dec. 17 to build the jail and honor camp as part of a $420-million courthouse and jail construction program. In January, supervisors are scheduled to decide whether to ask voters to approve a temporary, half-penny-per-dollar increase in the sales tax to help pay for the construction.

Supervisors George Bailey and Susan Golding, who have prodded the board toward solving the overcrowding problem, said the lack of jail space renders impotent much of the state’s tough-on-crime legislation.

“There’s an awful lot more plea-bargaining and quick-release than there should be,” Bailey said. “It’s got to happen when you’re releasing as many as we are that you’re releasing some that you shouldn’t be.”

“I’ve talked to a number of judges who want to put people in jail and can’t do it,” Golding said. “I know police are upset because they arrest people who ought to be booked and are not. When the citizens of this state continue to pass stronger law-and-order measures but the jails have not been able to keep up with that, then it really becomes a farce. There are laws on the books that cannot be enforced.”

Times staff writers Glenn F. Bunting and Jim Schachter contributed to this story.