Each of County’s Regional Jails Has Its Own Distinct Character

Faced with chronic overcrowding at the Central Jail in downtown San Diego, the county since 1977 has opened regional jails in Vista, Chula Vista and El Cajon, a jail camp in Descanso and a women’s jail in Santee. Here are brief descriptions of each.

Chula Vista

The South Bay jail, built in the basement of the county’s regional center in downtown Chula Vista, was designed for 192 inmates but often houses more than 500. With bunk beds and mattresses lining the walls of common areas, officials have stuffed as many as 586 inmates into the jail.

In what might seem a paradox, cells, normally thought of as places for punishment, are used here as rewards because of their scarcity.

“A cell to us is just a room, but the inmates call it their ‘house,’ ” Lt. Tom Zoll said. “If they don’t keep it clean or they carve up the walls or use it to beat up someone, we’ll take them out.”

A typical inmate module has 24 cells, 12 on the main floor and 12 on a mezzanine. The cells have no bars, just locking doors with windows through which deputies may peer during a security check. Each room has bunk beds, a small desk and a sink-toilet combination made of stainless steel.

Fifty or more inmates share four shower stalls in a common area. Six tables with benches--all bolted to the floor--are used for dining or card-playing. Meals are brought in on carts three times a day by jail trusties--inmates who earn 50 cents a day for performing maintenance, kitchen and other chores.

Two phones are available near the guard cage, on which inmates may make unlimited collect calls. Each inmate is allowed two half-hour visits each week, during which he can talk by phone with a friend he can see through a glass panel.

Reading material is limited to the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and paperback books from the jail’s library of donated volumes. Each module has two color television sets, bought with the profits from the small store that sells candy, cigarettes and other incidentals to inmates.

When inmates enter an overcrowded module, they check in with the module trusty, called a “tank captain” by the inmates.

He keeps a list of their names, provides them a bed roll, and assigns them a spot to sleep on the floor. As other inmates leave the module, the newer ones advance--first to bunks pushed against the walls in common areas, then to a cell with a roommate.

The South Bay jail has more state prison parole violators than the other jails because the state uses a jail conference room to hold hearings at which a panel decides whether to return an inmate to prison. The jail also has the highest percentage of gang members--about 20%--of any of the regional jails, in part because it has eight modules into which the gangs can be segregated.

El Cajon

The East County Jail, says Capt. J.C. La Suer, is a “luxury hotel for a prisoner.”

Indeed, inmates at the El Cajon jail live in high-rise rooms atop the East County Regional Center on Main Street. The view from many of the thin-slit windows is majestic: a panorama of El Cajon, the foothills and the Laguna Mountains. Prisoners play video games for free, watch the Padres’ home games on cable television and see movies offered by Home Box Office or culled from the jail’s membership in a video-movie club.

One inmate module has the county jail system’s only carpeted day room and a television with a 40-inch screen. The jail trusties--inmates who perform the jail’s daily chores--live even more comfortably here than elsewhere: they have a Coke machine, stereo, pool table and three video game machines.

“Everything you can give someone you can take away,” La Suer says. “These things are just another way of maintaining discipline.”

The newest of the county jails, El Cajon opened two years ago and has yet to have an inmate assault on a deputy. A state corrections official familiar with the jail attributes the lack of assaults to the deputies’ frequent rounds inside the modules, instituted after two early escape attempts. Although inmates quickly discovered that the jail’s plastic windows could be punched out, they were just as quick to assess the risk: there has not been an escape attempt since one inmate was killed when he fell from a seventh-floor window and another was seriously injured in a similar accident.

The East County jail was designed for 125 and sleeps 249 comfortably with double-bunking, but the jail averages more than 320 inmates. The extras sleep on mattresses spread on the floor inside the cells, not in day rooms as they do in other jails.

Vista

The oldest of the county’s regional jails, Vista is the only one that is able to book prisoners into jail directly from local police agencies. The Vista jail opened in 1979 to hold 157 inmates and was expanded in 1980 to hold 246 inmates; it has held as many as 420.

When another planned expansion is completed in 1988, the Vista jail will have a designed capacity of more than 500, which means that, with double bunking, it will hold more than 800 inmates and will likely be the county’s largest jail. The Central Jail downtown is limited by court order to a population of 750.

The Vista jail consists of two windowless wings set subtly behind the North County Regional Center. The older wing, known as Westhouse, contains three 38-bed dormitory modules with no private cells. The inmates are segregated in the dorms according to their size, demeanor and the seriousness of their charges, but each is a suspected or convicted felon.

Also in Westhouse is a module with five divided cells, each with four beds, where inmates who cause trouble are sent. Six inmates are accused of sexually assaulting a fellow prisoner there in July.

The newer wing, known as Northhouse, is for inmates suspected or convicted of misdemeanors. Built more in the modern, modular style of the Chula Vista and El Cajon jails, the north wing resembles a college residence hall with its block walls painted in loud shades of red, orange, green and blue. One of the four modules is used for the jail trusties, one is used for mentally ill inmates, one for unsentenced misdemeanants and one for sentenced misdemeanants.

Vista also is the only regional jail with cells for women. Eighteen women can be housed in a dormitory-style module.

Las Colinas

The women’s jail opened in 1977 and was the first facility outside of the downtown Central Jail.

The jail, north of Mission Gorge Road in Santee, was once a girls’ reform school.

Three years later, a 48-cell maximum-security wing and booking area were added to bring the jail’s state-rated capacity to 176. Last week, the jail had 242 inmates.

Las Colinas also has four lock-down cells for disciplinary use, two detoxification cells, and occupational therapy and education units.

Unlike other county jail inmates, however, the women at Las Colinas do their own laundry, using washers and dryers in the common areas of their modules.

The women in the maximum-security modules have a fenced exercise area, but those in the old reform school dormitories have access to volleyball, softball and tennis in an open recreation yard. The jail trusties even have a swimming pool.

In addition to the dozing and television watching that seem to be the favorite activities of inmates throughout the county jail system, prisoners at Las Colinas spend much of their time crocheting--everything from shawls to baby blankets.

Descanso

In a camp-like setting as far away from Central Jail in philosophy as it is in miles, the inmates at the Descanso jail camp live in 32-bed cabins that rim wide-open exercise and recreation areas. They play baseball, football, even Frisbee and horseshoes, or lift weights around an outdoor exercise shed.

Inside, the inmates play pool or Ping Pong in a recreation room or watch television, including Showtime and ballgames pulled in by a satellite dish antenna. As they are in every county jail, such extras are purchased with profits from the inmate store and are used by jailers to reward or punish the prisoners.

The seven-acre compound is surrounded by a 12-foot chain-link fence topped with razored and barbed wire. The camp, about a mile from Interstate 8 in the Descanso area east of Alpine, was built in the 1940s and housed Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Although the camp is home to criminals with a variety of charges or convictions, none of those sent to Descanso are classified as escape risks, because of its status as a medium-security jail. Thirty-five inmates have escaped since the camp opened in 1981. Thirty-one were recaptured.

Also excluded from Descanso, because they cannot be safely segregated, are convicts sentenced to state prison, known suicide risks, homosexuals, inmates with major medical problems, and those charged with sensitive sexual crimes, such as child molestation.

While the county’s other jails are constantly on guard for anything that might be fashioned into a weapon, inmates at Descanso occasionally use chain saws and axes to help clear the rugged terrain. Deputies say the open atmosphere reduces tension and thus makes violent incidents rare.

Descanso has a more extensive vocational program than the other jails. Inmates can work in the camp’s sewage treatment plant, and at least two have used the experience to obtain jobs upon their release. Other inmates have restored two aging fire trucks, and another has converted a paint shed into a studio, where he works full-time painting murals to be hung in the camp’s cafeteria.