‘82 Prison Law Symbolizes Distrust Between L.A. and Rest of California

On the fertile, flat farmlands of California’s San Joaquin Valley and on a high desert mesa east of San Diego, two vacant prisons loom over the barren landscape like mammoth white elephants.

These multimillion-dollar concrete fortresses are ready to receive their first inmates. Yet because of a 1982 law that first requires a prison to be built in Los Angeles County, they are forced to stand idle while the state’s inmate population swells.

Drafted by a small group of legislators angry about having those prisons forced on their constituents, the law was intended to build a fire under recalcitrant Los Angeles County lawmakers who successfully resisted efforts to locate a state prison in their districts.

Today, most legislators acknowledge that the expedient solution is to rescind the 5-year-old law, which is posing major problems for Gov. George Deukmejian, and to allow the two new prisons in San Diego and near Stockton to open.

Simple as that may sound, however, the law has come to symbolize the distrust that much of California feels toward its largest city, and rescinding it has become a practical impossibility.

‘Like Caving In to L.A.’

“If we do that it would be like caving in to Los Angeles,” Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), a key negotiator on the prison issue, said in a refrain echoed by many legislators. “We’d be saying, ‘Fine, we tried, but they won’t take a prison, so we give up.’ ”

Added Assemblyman Patrick Johnston: “Los Angeles’ delegation is so overwhelming in size compared to (that of) San Joaquin or any other county that we would never have the political power to require a prison in Los Angeles absent this leverage.”

But Johnston, the Stockton Democrat who helped hammer out the 1982 law, said no one connected with the effort expected it to result in so thorny a political dilemma. “Everyone accepted the agreement without hesitancy,” he said. “No one even blinked.”

If little else, the debate over the empty prisons has highlighted Los Angeles’ historic image as California’s bully, a behemoth with the power to muscle the system to its own advantage.

The county controls 12 of 40 Senate seats and 27 of 80 seats in the Assembly, although there are few occasions on which these lawmakers vote as a bloc.

Water Rights, State Projects

Nonetheless, regional resentment toward Los Angeles has flared into bitter north-south warfare over water rights and often erupts into loud squabbling over such bread-and-butter issues as the formulas used to distribute state money for education, highway construction and a variety of pork-barrel projects.

The debate in the Legislature over where to place a Los Angeles prison is entering its third year. And while smaller communities have been forced to accept prisons--a few have even requested them--Los Angeles remains a holdout.

Deukmejian is steadfast in his desire to see one built on the city’s Eastside; this is heatedly opposed by Latinos and a handful of Los Angeles Democrats. These opponents have managed to cast it as a partisan issue, however, effectively stalling any action in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Sen. President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), one of the governor’s most ardent opponents, has called for building a prison in Castaic, well away from Los Angeles’ urban core but smack in the middle of a heavily Republican district.

It is not far from the abandoned alcoholic rehabilitation “farm” in Saugus, which Mayor Tom Bradley, then running for governor, picked as his choice in the prison-siting derby and immediately found himself mired in predictable protests from irate neighbors.

2 Prisons Pondered

As a compromise, negotiators now are suggesting the possibility of building two prisons, one on the heavily Democratic Eastside and another in a rural, Republican area of the county. But that plan also could backfire, intensifying opposition in the Senate from both parties.

With California’s prison population at an all-time high, many lawmakers are running out of patience and once again viewing Los Angeles as the bad guy.

“If I were in Los Angeles and looking at the long term,” said Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista), “my concern would be whether the prison issue would establish a precedent by which the rest of California begins voting against Los Angeles.”

Peace, who helped draft the legal provisions that are keeping the new San Diego prison from opening, conceded that formation of such an anti-Los Angeles coalition would not be a certainty. But he contended that “there is a tremendous natural alliance that could be formed around this issue.”

Bolstering that argument is the rapid pace of prison construction all over the state since Deukmejian took office in 1983. New prisons are planned or near completion in nine different communities--ranging from San Diego in the south to far northern Del Norte County. Los Angeles’ absence from the list is conspicuous.

Halfway Houses, Jails Cited

Los Angeles lawmakers, sensitive to criticism over their failure to act, argue that they already are saddled with an existing federal prison (Terminal Island) and another being proposed for downtown. They also point out that the county already has large numbers of halfway houses and county jails housing thousands of prisoners. But with 200 inmates arriving at state prisons each week and with existing facilities operating at 176% of capacity, those protests have largely fallen on deaf ears.

One Northern California lawmaker, for example, got a practical lesson in the power of anti-Los Angeles sentiment last year when he faced a campaign built largely around his vote against the Los Angeles prison. Thousands of brochures were mailed to Sacramento constituents of Democratic Sen. Leroy Greene depicting a smog-shrouded Los Angeles Civic Center with this caption: “38% of all California criminals come from Los Angeles, which has never had a state prison. If Sen. Leroy Greene gets his way, it never will.”

Greene won the election but is now an avowed supporter of putting a prison in Los Angeles County.

Other legislators from districts outside Los Angeles are worried that they too could be caught in a political bind unless the dispute is ended soon and the two new prisons are allowed to operate. But they fear a backlash if they simply order the prisons opened without first requiring Los Angeles to accept one.

‘I Take Exception’

“As a legislator who has five prisons within and bordering his district, I take exception to these people who get all bent out of shape because a prison has been discussed for their district,” said Sen. Ruben S. Ayala (D-Chino).

Ayala said his constituents would find it hard to understand how the Legislature can let Los Angeles off the hook when they themselves must live with the constant fear of prison escapes. The most infamous of those was Kevin Cooper’s 1983 Chino prison breakout that ended in the deaths of four nearby residents.

“As lousy as the (Eastside) Los Angeles area may be for a prison,” he said, “it’s better than putting more prisoners in Chino.”

Despite Deukmejian’s recent public pronouncements that the dispute has brought the prison system to a near-crisis, the problem at this point is largely a political one.

The Northern California Women’s Facility at Stockton will soon be able to accommodate all 400 of its projected inmates. But the much larger San Diego prison, which was designed to hold more than 2,000 felons, would not have been ready to operate at full capacity until June in any event.

‘May Be Only Viable Way’

If no solution is found by that time, there will be intense pressure to break the agreement and open the two prisons even without resolving the Los Angeles dispute--a bitter pill to swallow for much of the state.

“It may be the only viable way to go,” said Les Kleinberg, who has studied the prison issue for the Senate’s Office of Research.

For now at least, even members of Los Angeles’ legislative delegation are unsure about tearing up the agreement that keeps the prisons closed and their feet to the fire.

“It was motivated by anger,” Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), a former Los Angeles police chief, said of the 5-year-old pact.

“The anger is that Los Angeles, which is a great contributor to the population of dangerous felons, has abjectly failed to show any sense of responsibility in erecting a state prison. Even if (the Legislature) backs down and lets Los Angeles off the hook, the anger will still be there.”