Jail Inmate Transfer to Begin Today : Move Scheduled as Post-Holiday Influx Is Due

Sheriff’s officials expect to transfer some Orange County Jail inmates to the new 409-bed modular units at the James A. Musick Honor Farm today, in plenty of time to meet a federal judge’s Jan. 15 deadline limiting the jail’s population.

However, nearly 400 people are scheduled to begin serving jail sentences in January, which means Orange County’s jail overcrowding problems are likely to continue, Assistant Sheriff Jerry Krans said. The reason for the increase is that judges wanted to permit defendants to remain free during the holidays.

“We’re concerned about it, but the new Musick facility is certainly going to help,” Krans said.

Officials from both the Sheriff’s Department and the General Services Agency worked late Friday night and all weekend to put the final touches on the new, temporary Musick facility near El Toro.

Move From Tents

Most of the inmates will come from the four temporary tents just a few hundred yards away, used by Sheriff Brad Gates with federal court approval to reduce overcrowding at the main jail. But others will come from the main jail or the Theo Lacy Branch Jail, with some main jail inmates moving to Theo Lacy, said Capt. Jack DeVereaux, Musick’s commander.

Gates sent a sharply critical letter to GSA officials just before Christmas asking them to speed up work on the new units, citing pressure from U.S. District Judge William P. Gray.

Gray has ordered Gates to limit the population at the main men’s jail in downtown Santa Ana to 1,500 inmates by Jan. 15 and to 1,400 by April 1. It is the first time a judge has placed a ceiling on the population at the main jail, which has been overcrowded since the American Civil Liberties Union first took the county to federal court nearly 10 years ago.

The main men’s jail, with a capacity for 1,191, had more than 2,000 inmates when Gray issued his first order dealing with overcrowding last March 18. After three months, jail officials had reduced the population to between 1,600 and 1,700 by setting up the tents, releasing more people arrested for misdemeanors, and refusing to take federal and state prisoners.

But jail officials can’t meet the judge’s orders without the expansion projects at Musick and Lacy. The Lacy expansion is on schedule but won’t be ready until April.

The Jan. 15 deadline is a 45-day extension of the judge’s original deadline. The extension was requested by a special master appointed to oversee jail problems.

The new modular units at Musick give Gates just a net gain of 89 beds because the tents held 320. But if the arrival of new inmates this month puts the main jail over the limit, Gates can always use the tents again.

“We’re going to keep the tents in place,” DeVereaux said. “We’ve not made a final decision what to do about them.”

The eight new modular units in a horseshoe shape around a recreation yard will be a jail within a jail, like the tents. They are surrounded by a 10-foot-high chain-link fence, topped with razor-edge wiring. Outside is the regular Musick Honor Farm, which is also fenced in. The honor farm has 200 men and 40 women inmates, who are in separate dormitory facilities across a parking lot from each other.

DeVereaux said he was not sure how many inmates would move to the new facility today. The move will take several days.

The new inmates will not work on the farm, as the others do. Instead, they will work on public service projects off the farm, DeVereaux said.

Gates’ biggest problem is that he cannot send inmates to Musick who have not been sentenced but are only awaiting trial. In part, that’s because of a commitment to residents in the south county that only inmates convicted of minor crimes--those who would serve time in jail rather than in state prison--would be housed at Musick. Also, it’s too difficult for sheriff’s officials to make the trip back and forth to Musick from the County Courthouse in downtown Santa Ana.

Most of the inmates at the main jail--sometimes as many as 75% of them--are awaiting trials. Another problem is that inmates with histories of trouble-making cannot be sent to a minimum security facility.