County Will Take Steps to Trim Jail Population

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Tuesday voted to attempt to reduce the population of Central Jail by more than 3,000 inmates as part of a settlement of a 12-year-old lawsuit that sought to improve conditions at the facility.

A 3-1 vote of the supervisors approved the settlement of the suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union after the board was informed in a closed session that attorneys for the county and the ACLU had agreed on terms.

County Counsel DeWitt Clinton said that the settlement still must be approved by U.S. District Court Judge William Gray, who has had jurisdiction over the jail since the federal government moved against jail overcrowding in a separate suit. The federal government won that suit in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, but other conditions at the jail remained contested in the ACLU action.

Prisoner Shifts

If Judge Gray approves the county-ACLU settlement, it would mean shifts of prisoners from Central Jail to other county facilities. A program to release some misdemeanor offenders would be expanded, and local police departments would be encouraged to issue citations or detain suspects in local lockups rather than automatically booking prisoners into County Jail. The departments would be encouraged to encourage misdemeanor prisoner releases by issuing citations and to hold prisoners overnight in their jails or lockups.

Supervisor Ed Edelman said the settlement means that the county now has time to devise its own solution to overcrowding, rather than have the courts order it to build a new jail.

“It means we can keep control,” he said.

But Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who cast the dissenting vote, said the settlement “establishes a procedure that will allow early release of criminals serving time in County Jail. I would rather have the criminals inconvenienced.”

The settlement sets the capacity of Central Jail at 5,800. It is now 8,890--or 3,654 over its 5,236 capacity. The county has six months to reduce the population.

That reduction, both the county and the ACLU agreed, will allow Sheriff Sherman Block to eliminate several targets of the lawsuit, including the use of day rooms as housing units and cell overcrowding.

Under the agreement, Block agreed to put 500 inmates at the Mira Loma jail facility on a work release program and shift other minimum-security Mira Loma prisoners to the minimum-security facility at Pitchess Honor Rancho. That would leave space at Mira Loma for transfer of prisoners from Central Jail.

More Central Jail inmates would be moved to Biscailuz Center and to a proposed new medium-security facility at Pitchess Honor Rancho.

In addition, the Sheriff’s Department agreed to work with the courts to speed release of nonviolent prisoners before trial, and to speed prisoner processing with a proposed reception center in the northern part of the county.

Discussions between county and ACLU attorneys have been under way for several weeks.