Jail Overcrowding Turns on Semantics With a Wink at Double-Bunking

Without spending a dime or lifting a finger, the state could cut San Diego County’s jail overcrowding in half overnight.

Such a feat could be done not by building more jails or releasing dangerous inmates onto the streets, but by bringing the official, on-paper “capacity” of the county’s jails in line with what Sheriff John Duffy recognizes privately as the lock-ups’ true ability to hold prisoners without incident.

When battling within the county for more jail construction funds, Duffy often describes the six jails under his control as holding nearly twice their so-called rated capacity of 1,689. That fact helped him persuade the county Board of Supervisors to declare the overcrowding an emergency and, in a crisis atmosphere, to order deep cuts in other government programs to pay for jail construction and operation.

But reports prepared by the state Board of Corrections, which monitors jails in California’s 58 counties, show that Duffy and his staff do not actually consider the jails full until they are holding 2,415 inmates, a figure 43% higher than the number the Sheriff’s Department uses publicly as the benchmark to measure overcrowding.

The 726-inmate difference between the two figures--a number nearly equal to the capacity of County Jail downtown--illustrates how bare statistics can obscure the basic facts about jail overcrowding. And while few observers dispute that San Diego County’s jails are holding more prisoners than they ought to, defining the extent of that overcrowding can be crucial to the timing of multimillion dollar decisions on new jails and the taxes needed to pay for them.

Minimum Standards

The difference between the jail capacity figures county officials use in public and in private stems from the fact that minimum standards set by the state Board of Corrections say that single cells are to be occupied by one, not two inmates. But San Diego and almost every other county in the state consider placing two inmates per cell in newer jails a normal, unavoidable and manageable fact of life.

Double-bunking has become so routine, in fact, that new jails are being constructed with built-in mounts in the cell walls to support the second bunks. The state will not certify the finished building if two bunks are installed in a single cell. But as soon as a new jail is certified as meeting state standards, the county is free to install the second bunks, while the state, in effect, looks the other way. In fact, except during construction, when it monitors the use of state funds, the Board of Corrections lacks any power to enforce the standards it sets.

“The day the construction contract is dead, then the place is the county’s and they can put in the additional bunks,” said Neil Zinn, a field representative for the board. “All the (state) money is expended and they’ve given us the last report we need.”

Double-bunking will be a fact of life in the expanded detention facilities now under construction at the county jail in Vista, according to Assistant Sheriff Ken Wigginton. Officially, the expansion will contain room for 296 inmates in 296 single cells, he said. But since the county plans to put nearly 600 inmates in the new portion of the jail, it is building the cells to accommodate two bunks, not one.

“If something has to be an integral part of the wall, it would be rather foolish to build without it,” Wigginton said. “This way, you’re ready to go in and double-bunk if and when it becomes necessary.”

The county is taking that theory one step further in its latest jail planning, Wigginton added.

The official plans for a new jail on East Mesa in the South Bay call for 600 single cells, he noted. But county jailers fully intend to double-bunk most of the cells. And with that expectation in mind, the entire jail has been designed to hold more than 1,000 inmates.

Officially Overcrowded

For instance, cell-block day rooms--which under minimum standards are to include 35 square-feet per inmate--are being designed with the knowledge that two inmates, not one, will occupy nearly every cell. Kitchens, laundries, and other areas are being similarly planned.

“We want the rest of that jail to be built to proper size so that you don’t create overcrowding throughout,” Wigginton said.

The result will be a jail which, if it held only 600 prisoners, would be considered luxurious by current standards. Still, as soon as that jail holds 601 inmates, it will be officially overcrowded.

Though the common areas in the county’s existing jails were not built with double-bunking in mind, inspection reports prepared by the Board of Corrections show that county officials consider each of the jails capable of holding more than their official designed capacity:

- The South Bay jail in Chula Vista has an official capacity of 192 inmates. But counting double-bunking and a few special cells available for isolation and other uses, the jail is considered by the county to have a true capacity of 405.

- The East County jail in El Cajon is rated for 120 inmates. The county considers its actual capacity to be 251.

- The Vista jail is officially rated for 246 inmates, while the county says it can hold 343.

- The Descanso jail camp in East County is rated by the state to hold 225 inmates. The county rates its capacity at 384.

- The Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee is rated at a capacity of 176 by the state and at 282 by the county.

- The Central Jail downtown, which is much older than the regional jails and has a court-ordered cap on its population, is rated by the state to hold 730 inmates and by the county at 750--the court cap.

Using either set of numbers, the county’s jails are considered overcrowded. On Wednesday, for example, the jail system held 3,005 inmates. Measured by the Board of Corrections’ capacity of the jails, the system was 178% overcrowded. Using what the state refers to as the county’s “self-rated” capacity, the jails would be considered 124% overcrowded.

Although the Board of Corrections has no power to enforce its standards, it at one time routinely granted variances to counties that asked for permission to put two inmates in single cells. San Diego County was given a variance in 1983 to double-bunk one-third of the cells in the South Bay and Las Colinas facilities.

But Norma Lammers, the board’s executive officer, said the board has stopped granting such variances because they became so common that they threatened to render the single-cell standard meaningless.

“There was a feeling that by granting the variances, we had basically departed from our standard,” Lammers said. “It had become so pro forma it looked as if we had changed the standard.”

During a review of the issue in 1985, in fact, the board considered abandoning the standard altogether and officially sanctioning double-celling, Lammers said. Although the single-cell standard was ultimately upheld, counties across the state violate it without consequence.

“We have found that you can double-cell a single-cell facility, so long as you increase your staffing proportionately, without substantially causing any types of increase in assaults and violence,” Lammers said. “When you try to add a third person into a housing area, that’s when the national research shows that you have substantially more violence and incidents occuring.”

Additional Problems

Similarly, courts have generally ruled that double-bunking in itself is not “cruel and unusual punishment,” but have instead required that additional problems be present before they order jail managers to cut inmate populations.

Alex Landon, a San Diego attorney who has represented inmates in jail overcrowding lawsuits filed against the county, said he would have little difficulty accepting a two-inmates-per-cell standard, if that was where the crowding ended.

“If you had a new facility, and you double-bunked it, and that’s all you had in there, you could probably live with that,” Landon said. “Once you start going beyond that, and start putting people into the free areas, even though you have space in there, that’s when trouble begins.”

A particular concern of correctional experts is that single cells be available to inmates who have not yet been to trial and are thus presumed innocent.

“To put that inmate in with someone else who could be dangerous, could be mentally ill, could be drunk, is not the appropriate way to handle a pretrial inmate,” said Carol Kiziah, a criminal justice planner for Contra Costa County who has worked as a consultant for the Board of Corrections. “That’s why it’s a standard.”

The Department of Corrections, which builds and operates the state prisons, uses the same single-cell construction standards that are applied to local jails. The new state prison on Otay Mesa thus has an official capacity of 2,200 inmates. But department officials concede that the prison was planned to hold about 4,000.

Why not simply define the prison’s capacity at that level?

“We would prefer, all things being equal, to have single cells,” said Corrections Department Director James Rowland. “Maybe we’re being optimistic.”