First Inmates Arrive at New Prison in Otay Mesa

More than 100 burglars, robbers and drug dealers arrived in San Diego on Monday, the first inmates at a new medium-security state prison that would have opened eight months ago if not for a legislative stalemate.

The prison, two miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in Otay Mesa, is expected, along with a women’s prison in Stockton that also opened Monday, to help relieve overcrowding in California’s 16-prison system, which now holds more than 65,000 inmates.

“We feel we can use the San Diego prison to begin to deactivate places like gyms and day rooms (at overcrowded prisons) and turn them back into their intended uses,” said Robert Gore, an assistant director of the Corrections Department. “Stockton will immediately impact the most overcrowded institution in the state, the California Institution for Women, near Chino.”

Though partly completed and ready to open last November, the two prisons were prevented from receiving inmates by a law requiring the Legislature and Gov. George Deukmejian to first agree on at least one location for a prison in Los Angeles County.

That obstacle was removed July 18, when Deukmejian signed compromise legislation naming two sites, one in East Los Angeles and the other near Lancaster, and agreed to consider a third location in the isolated Hungry Valley in North Los Angeles County.

Construction Not Complete

But construction on the San Diego institution, known officially as the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility at Rock Mountain, still is not complete, and workers were putting the finishing touches on half the prison as the first 38 inmates arrived on a bus from Chino on Monday morning.

Because the prison’s receiving center is in the part of the prison that is not yet open, the inmates entered through an emergency back door of a prison cell block that will eventually be used to segregate inmates who cannot be safely housed with the institution’s other prisoners.

By the end of the day, 110 prisoners, almost all from Southern California, had been accepted into the prison. The first inmate through the door was Michael Tates, a San Diego man convicted of robbery.

Most of those who arrived Monday were minimum-security inmates who will work around the prison grounds in maintenance, fire protection and kitchen duty. Their convictions were on charges ranging from sale of marijuana to manslaughter.

Inmates Interviewed

After arriving at the prison, the inmates were interviewed by officers in an attempt to prevent problems that might arise out of their placement in one housing area or another.

“When you enter a prison, where you get housed can affect your life,” Gore said. “If you’re in with someone who doesn’t like you, it can be fatal.”

Supt. John Ratelle said he expects to be sent roughly 250 inmates each week until the prison’s 2,200 beds are full. Within a few months after that, he added, the prison probably will be overcrowded. Eventually, almost all of the prison’s standard cells will be holding two prisoners, though state design standards call for them to hold only one inmate each.

But Monday, the 110 inmates were outnumbered by the 120 correctional officers on duty and more than a dozen members of the local media, who tromped through a tour of one of the buildings like prospective buyers at an open house, sizing up cells as if they were bedrooms, inspecting the restrooms and trying out the telephones.

‘Grinning’ Superintendent

Ratelle, who helped open three prison expansions before Deukmejian named him superintendent of the San Diego facility, was like a proud father upon the birth of a child. One of his officers said Ratelle was “grinning from ear to ear” when he arrived at the prison Monday to begin his first day overseeing inmates instead of acting as official tour guide for the curious officials and reporters who have come through the prison over the past several months.

“This is great,” Ratelle said to reporters after the first inmates had been ushered inside. “I’m glad (the waiting) is over with.”

Teena Farmon, superintendent of the 400-bed Stockton facility, said that prison took in 37 inmates Monday and expects to receive about 150 each week. The prison is just south of the Stockton city limits in an unincorporated area of San Joaquin County.

State officials said the delay in opening the prisons cost $7.1 million, with most of that going in per diem payments to prison employees who were assigned to their new locations in November and then had to be compensated for expenses after they were sent back to other prisons during the stalemate.

The two prisons are part of an unprecedented state prison building boom that will mean the construction of more than 26,000 beds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $2.2 billion, doubling California’s prison capacity, Gore said. He said the prison system accepts 300 more inmates than it discharges each month.