No Bars : Prisoners in New Jail Center to Find Neither Steel Nor Privacy--Just Glass

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department put its new $69-million Intake and Release Center in Santa Ana on display Friday, unveiling 480 maximum-security beds and electronically controlled doors, but no gray bars--just glass.

County officials hope the facility, located adjacent to the main men’s jail on Santa Ana Boulevard west of Flower Street, will help relieve severe jail overcrowding that led a federal judge to hold the sheriff and county supervisors in contempt of court.

It is the first new jail to open in Orange County since the main men’s facility was completed in 1968.

However, it is not the much larger facility planned near Anaheim Stadium that has stirred controversy and even an anti-jail petition drive.

Burdette Pulver, the county’s project manager for constructing the intake-release center, said the building was turned over to the Sheriff’s Department Thursday. Although it has no inmates yet, Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Heacock said the building has been secured and is being staffed by deputies.

Heacock said about 48 minimum and medium-security inmates might be moved into part of the facility next week to help deputies learn the building’s systems and routines and to test the electronics.

He said it is not certain when the facility will be filled with the maximum-security prisoners that it was built to hold.

The new structure, which is going on line seven months behind schedule, will serve as the intake and release center for the entire Orange County correctional system. Any prisoner who enters the system will be booked at the new building and then housed at one of the county’s six jail facilities.

Inside the building Friday, it was shiny and clean. The floor is covered with gray rubber tiles. The rest of the structure is glass, steel and concrete.

The design of the housing areas is intended to reduce the number of personnel needed to monitor prisoners. There are five modules built around semicircles of 96 cells each. A deputy’s duty station is at the center of each module. A deputy can sit on a raised, circular, glassed-in platform and look down at 48 cells, and then look up at 48 cells above the first set.

The medical ward is one of five similar housing sections in the new building. Three of the others are for men and one is for women. The medical staff is expected to increase from three full-time doctors and 60 nurses to four full-time doctors, one part-time physician and 93 nurses.

Many of the cells in the medical ward at the main men’s jail are out of sight from a deputy’s duty station.

The cells in the new building have big glass windows and large sections of glass in the doors so that the deputies can watch inmates more easily. And instead of pounding on the cell bars to call jailers, the new cells have intercoms.

“We’re really proud of the facility,” Heacock said. “We think it is going to be a good place to work and a good place for the inmates.”

Two and a half years ago, U.S. District Judge William P. Gray found Sheriff Brad Gates and the county supervisors in contempt of court for not obeying his 1978 order to end overcrowding in the main men’s jail.

He fined the county, appointed a special monitor and began reducing the number of inmates that could be held at the facility.

From more than 2,200 inmates at its peak population, the main jail’s population has dropped to about 1,400. Gray has insisted that no more than 1,298 be kept in the main housing units.

Many inmates have been transferred to branch facilities in Orange and El Toro to relieve the main facility.