Sheriff’s Control of Jail Looms as Issue Before Supervisors

Under pressure to find long-term solutions to jail overcrowding, the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider a series of proposals, including a politically explosive study of whether to take some control away from the Sheriff’s Department.

Although Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates is said to oppose any reorganization, the lawman, who was reelected to a fourth term last month with 64% of the vote, has withheld comment.

Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Robert Rivas would only say: “We are cooperating in any continuing studies in regard to the jail. It’s still too early to draw any conclusions or make any recommendations.”

Aides to several supervisors said both the board and the Sheriff’s Department have nothing to lose by a study of the cost-effectiveness of operating the jail with lower-paid correctional officers instead of deputies.

Additionally, there is an emerging consensus for trying other once-controversial measures to lower the inmate population at the county’s main jail in Santa Ana, including at-home incarceration, adding beds at a halfway house and making more prisoners eligible for a county parole program.

And Tuesday, Supervisor Harriett Wieder is expected to formally propose the construction of the county’s first “sobering-up” station for public drunks.

A Wieder aide, Rod Speer, said she will suggest that the county join with the City of Santa Ana--which last year arrested 280 to 300 public drunks a month--to fund a detoxification center. In April, Gates barred the jailing of public inebriates and others facing misdemeanor charges. In response, Santa Ana is now taking only about 70 drunks into custody each month--often letting otherwise-healthy inebriates “sleep it off” in public parks, according to Santa Ana police officials. With annual costs of County Jail operations projected as tripling over the next 15 years to $97.4 million, Wieder said, “we cannot continue business as usual.”

“If we continue this way,” she added, “we’d be spending all the county general fund budget for the sheriff. That’s ridiculous. That’s not the only service the county is responsible for.”

Supervisor Bruce Nestande, who asked County Administrative Officer Larry Parrish to prepare the report on jail-overcrowding problems and potential solutions that will be considered Tuesday, said he was concerned that the Sheriff’s Department had become too big a bureaucracy to effectively deal with overcrowding.

“It’s in the nature of the job that he (Gates) sees things differently than somebody whose only job is to house prisoners,” Nestande said.

“That’s why I think we need a separate agency that would, on its own independent track, give us a set of priorities not biased by conflicting concerns.”

Although Gates has said supervisors failed to heed his warnings about the overcrowding problem, some board members note privately that the sheriff at budget time consistently lobbies for high-priced items, such as last year’s $1.4 million for two patrol helicopters and an earlier laser fingerprint-detection system, not new jails.

Advocates Cooperation

But Wieder, reflecting a conciliatory tone taken by some board members, said she would prefer that any study of jail reorganization be a cooperative effort.

“I’d like to see this done in conjunction with the sheriff,” she said.

The county seems to have scrapped a proposal to levy fees on residents in the unincorporated county “islands” in central, north and west Orange County to recoup the high cost of patrols in those isolated areas. Such a fee would generate funds for additional jail space and beds.

“We would view it as a tax on patrol services to deal with the jail-overcrowding problem,” Speer said. “And that didn’t sit quite right with anyone.”

Eight years ago, a federal judge ordered Orange County to end overcrowding in the main jail for men. Last year, when nearly 500 inmates slept on floors, the judge held the county in criminal contempt for failure to comply.

Remedial measures such as tents, trailers and expansion of existing facilities were undertaken. Still, Gates was unable to bring down the number of inmates to caps set by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray.

Short-Term Jail Plan

It wasn’t until early this year, when County Counsel Adrian Kuyper warned board members that they, too, could face personal fines and jail if the judge’s orders were not met, that supervisors began gearing up for a wholesale attack on the problem.

At the urging of staff, supervisors launched plans for a short-term, 1,500-bed jail that could be built quickly and economically.

Supervisors, in a 4-1 vote, settled on county land near Anaheim Stadium for a medium- to maximum-security facility.

Anaheim officials have opposed the site, as have two state legislators, casting doubt on the county’s ability to obtain state jail funds for a facility at that location.

Even if a short-term site can be built, estimates of the jail population suggest there will still be a shortage of 3,000 to 6,000 beds by the year 2000.

Staff analysts say it is imperative that supervisors move forward on plans for a long-term facility, which have been stalled for years over squabbles about where to put it.

For now, court-appointed jail master Lawrence G. Grossman said inmate numbers have stayed below the 1,400-inmate weekday cap set by Judge Gray.

Trouble Forecast

“They’ve been doing very well,” Grossman said last week. “But if they don’t get a new jail within the next 18 months, they’ll be in trouble.”

Meanwhile, Grossman indicated that an early-release program, which permits Gates to free some prisoners up to five days early when the jail is reaching capacity, has been successful.

Currently, the number of inmates is allowed to climb to 1,450 on weekends and 1,500 on three-day holiday weekends. But by fall, Gray has said he will authorize no more than 1,400 at any time.

To lower the population further, the staff report recommends adding 36 beds to a 24-bed halfway house and developing a pilot program for jailing low-risk prisoners at home with electronic monitoring.

Armed with a county counsel opinion saying it is legal, the staff report also recommends expanding a county parole program to include prisoners who are sentenced to jail as a condition of formal probation.

Presiding Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey had doubts about the legality of such a plan.

Dickey said Superior Court judges generally felt that “it is the judiciary’s responsibility to sentence people for whatever period of time is deemed appropriate.”

Paroles Questioned

“It is the responsibility of the executive branch of government to provide the jail facilities,” he said.

Dickey questioned whether it is proper “to use parole for reasons of jail overcrowding.”

But any challenge would probably come not from the judges but from the district attorney’s office.

“We have taken the position that when a judge places somebody on probation with a condition of jail time, nobody is in a position to change those conditions,” said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright.

“In the real world, those who get probation and jail time by and large are not first offenders but are ones who are one step away from state prison,” Enright said.

“I don’t feel these people should be released from jail because of the overcrowding situation.”

However, he said it remains to be seen what action his office would take.

In the meantime, the proposal to study reorganizing the jail system is likely to be confined to a separate corrections department for minimum-security inmates and some work-release programs, as is the case in Ventura County.

Opposition Indicated

While that would leave the vast majority of medium- to maximum-security prisoners under the control of the sheriff, Wieder aide Speer said that Assistant Sheriff Jerry Krans had indicated that his department still would oppose such a plan.

In a tour last week of Orange County’s minimum-security facility, the James A. Musick Honor Farm, Speer said Krans told Wieder that a new department would mean duplication of administrative costs with little or no savings in personnel.

But Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said he favors examining all options to determine the most cost-effective way to run the jails and provide new facilities.

Taking jail operations away from the sheriff “is a controversial issue,” Riley conceded. “How much you take away from an existing officeholder can be worse than giving him something he doesn’t want to have,” Riley said.