Suit Takes Aim at Entire System : Groups Want Overcrowding Eased at All County Jails

Seven years after they won population controls at the teeming County Jail downtown, San Diego prisoners’ rights advocates have filed a lawsuit seeking to extend the limits throughout the county’s jam-packed jail system.

The suit, filed late last week by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, charges that the unconstitutional conditions that necessitated court control over the downtown jail have spread into the county’s outlying jails in El Cajon, Vista, Chula Vista and Santee.

“Current conditions in those facilities fail to meet minimal contemporary standards of decency and do not supply a minimal civilized measure of the necessities of life,” according to the suit, which catalogues an array of degrading, unhealthful and hazardous conditions in the four overcrowded jails.

Shuttling Prisoners

Since 1980, when then-San Diego County Superior Court Judge James Focht imposed a 750-inmate cap on the population of the central jail, county jailers concede they have tried--often unsuccessfully--to adhere to the court order by shuttling prisoners to the four outlying jails.

If the overcrowding problem is to be addressed sensibly, the prisoners’ rights lawyers insist, a judge must be able to exert control over the entire jail system.

“This is an attempt to try to seek some vehicle for getting the court to oversee the entire system,” said attorney Alex Landon, who filed the suit on behalf of the ACLU.

“Court involvement has been helping in trying to deal with issues of overcrowding,” Landon said. “The continued involvement of the court can be useful to all the parties concerned, but I think it’s important that the court be able to speak to all the facilities.”

County supervisors, who will discuss the lawsuit at a closed meeting today, greeted the new litigation with a mixture of anger and resignation.

Will ‘Force Release’

Brian Bilbray, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, criticized the inmates’ lawyers for adopting a “confrontational approach” in the ongoing debate about jail crowding.

“This will not mean more jails are going to be built,” Bilbray said. “All it’s going to mean is that they’re going to force the county to release criminals out on the street that should be behind bars.”

Bilbray complained that the suit ignored the steps taken by the county in recent months to defuse the crowding problem.

Supervisors last month approved construction of a 600-bed men’s jail to the Las Colinas County Jail for women in Santee. There also are plans for a 200-bed expansion of the women’s jail and construction of an 850-bed jail near Otay Mesa. The county, too, is negotiating with the federal government for the use of an Air Force-owned parking lot on Midway Drive as the site of a pretrial detention center.

“We are doing everything humanly possible to maximize the capabilities of this county to hold prisoners,” Bilbray said. “The problem is that the civil libertarians have reached the point where they’re saying prisoners in the jails take priority over the protection of the citizen on the street.”

Supervisor Susan Golding, like Bilbray, said she wished the lawyers had sued the state rather than the county, insisting that inadequate funding by the state is largely responsible for the county’s estimated $500 million in unmet jail and court needs.

Still, Golding said the suit could be viewed as a constructive step. “If anything, it’s positive,” she said. “It underlines what all of us--and certainly I--have been saying for a long time, which is that the jails are overcrowded.”

So overcrowded, in fact, that Supervisor George Bailey predicted that the county was sure to lose the lawsuit and face the imposition of further court control over the jails.

“I’m surprised they waited this long,” he said of the ACLU and Legal Aid lawyers.

Suit Details Conditions

The lawsuit details the deterioration in living standards that results from chronic overcrowding in the county’s jails. It charges that the security of inmates and guards is jeopardized, that medical needs go unattended and that inmates are unable to meet with their lawyers or maintain the confidence of their legal communications.

Some inmates get clean underwear and towels only once per week, the suit says. Sometimes four or five prisoners are packed into cells designed to house a single inmate. Hundreds of inmates, the suit notes, are forced to eat and sleep on filthy floors.

At Las Colinas, it alleges, “because of the number of women eating on the floor, the day rooms and cells are becoming infested with ants and other vermin, making sleeping on the floor even more unpleasant.”

One day last month--a day the suit describes as typical--the population of the four outlying jails ranged from 167% to 337% of their rated capacity.

Lt. John Tenwolde, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, declined to comment on the specific circumstances described in the lawsuit. But he noted that Sheriff John Duffy and other top department officials have readily acknowledged the inadequacies of the jail system during their struggle for additional beds and increased funding.

“We are certainly not ones to try to mitigate the terrible conditions in the jails,” Tenwolde said.

Lawyers for the inmates admit they have no magical solutions to the crowding and its attendant problems.

Rather, Landon renewed the arguments he has raised in recent court hearings reviewing the status of the central jail. The county, he said, should:

- Make maximum use of alternatives to incarceration.

- Analyze more carefully the makeup of the jail system’s population to assure that only those offenders who need to be locked up are.

- Consider creating facilities to house public drunks, the mentally ill and the homeless outside the jails, at lower costs.

Bilbray, however, expressed skepticism about the intentions of the prisoners’ rights lawyers.

“Why don’t these people just admit what their real priority is?” he asked. “They don’t support new jails. What they’re suing for is because they want prisoners released at any cost.”

Landon disagreed, saying he and other lawyers involved in the decade-long litigation over crowding at the central jail have sought to work with the county to improve conditions, not to open wide the gates of the jails.

“All of us recognize there are jails and there need to be jails,” he said. “Our interest is that the jails be run in a way so that they’re not overcrowded and do not pose a dangerous place for both the inmates and staff who live there to be involved with.”