County Must Move Fast to Locate Place for 300 Prisoners, Gates Says

Converting a women’s jail into a men’s maximum security facility to create beds for an additional 300 prisoners would only partially solve the overcrowding problems at Orange County Jail, Sheriff Brad Gates said Friday.

“Obviously, you have to find another site to take over 300 women and house them,” Gates said during a press conference at the Sheriff’s Department. “And that’s not an easy chore to do.

“It would be a difficult decision by the board (of supervisors) to be able to pick a place we can (use) for a temporary period of time . . . until the other facility (is) available,” he said.

Gates, in a letter to supervisors this week, requested space for an additional 300 maximum security beds and 300 minimum security beds by year’s end to comply with a federal court order to reduce overcrowding at the central jail in Santa Ana.

Would Replace Tents

He said Friday that while the 300 minimum security beds would replace temporary tents which currently house inmates at the James A. Musick honor farm near El Toro, that still leaves the question of where to put the additional beds for maximum security prisoners.

“That facility (Musick) is not designed for maximum security . . . unless the board wants to consider changing the environmental criteria that were established there,” he explained.

The sheriff said the county needs to find a place quickly to properly house 300 maximum security male prisoners “either by altering the female jail or by finding a building we can go into immediately. . . . That’s how Brad Gates would do it and I would start today. I would have started a long time ago if I had the power to do it.”

“My job is keeper of the jail,” Gates added. “My job is to tell the county what I need for jail facilities. My job is not to run out and find jail sites and look for funding. That’s the job of the CAO (county administrative office), the GSA (General Services Agency), the EMA (Environmental Management Agency) and the board. My job is tell them I need it, and we’ve been telling them that for a long time.”

‘Just An Alternative’

Gates was quick to point out that the idea of converting the women’s jail to house male prisoners “is just a potential alternative that we’re looking at this point in time. We’re trying to look everywhere we can.”

The idea was discussed at a meeting of the county’s task force on jail overcrowding last week, Gates said, and there will be further meetings with the Environmental Management Agency as well as the General Services Agency “to get them to give us their best calculation as to what’s involved if we actually decide to do that.”

Gates said he has been told that an environmental impact report on a proposed new minimum security facility at the Musick branch jail will be done on July 31 and that the work could be completed within six months.

“That will give us 200, 300 beds automatically,” Gates said. “I think as long as we’re moving along and . . . building facilities, moving toward the goal that the judge and all of us want to get to, he’s going to leave us alone.”

U.S. District Judge William P. Gray held Gates and the county Board of Supervisors in contempt of court in March, 1985, for failing to comply with a 7-year-old order to ease overcrowding at the men’s main jail, which was designed to hold 1,200 prisoners and has housed more than 2,000 at times.

Order Slightly Modified

Gray last week slightly modified his order for a 1,400-inmate ceiling by allowing Gates to house 1,450 inmates on weekends and 1,500 on three-day weekends. But the judge also warned county officials that they must be prepared to live within the 1,400 ceiling by the end of summer.

In his letters to the board requesting additional space, Gates said: “We have reached the proverbial bottom line. Under the current conditions it will be difficult to continue the safe and humane operation of the County Jail and meet the mandate of the court.”

Without the additional beds, Gates said Friday that by summer “we’ll be putting up a ‘no vacancy’ sign and we’ll probably be turning felons back into the community.”

“We know when we move into the summer season that the level of our criminal activity tends to go up, especially in the very serious area of violent and dangerous criminals,” he said.

“And then, if you look at the filings in the felony area that are going up in all court districts, when those come out of the system and start hitting us in the summertime, we’re going to (have) a serious problem.”