Santee Keeps One Eye on the Calendar, One on County as Temporary Jail Opens

Perhaps the best description of San Diego County’s new temporary men’s jail in Santee can be found, not in details such as cost, capacity or physical layout, but in the feelings of those who will get to know it best: the inmates.

With the jail scheduled to open its gates Monday, some county prisoners already are asking to be transferred to it, sheriff’s deputies said.

When prisoners ask to be sent to a jail, sight unseen, that says volumes about the boffo advance reviews that it is receiving from what could be its harshest critics.

“We’re not really looking for volunteers, but the ones who do get sent here will find a much better environment than in the other jails,” said Lt. John Swink, the jail’s assistant commander. “If you have to be in jail, I guess this is the place to be.”

Santee officials and residents, however, have a considerably less sanguine attitude toward their new--and, from the city’s perspective, unwelcome--neighbor. After having fought unsuccessfully in court to block the jail’s construction, Santee residents, still fuming over what they see as the county’s intransigence in placing a “barbed-wire concentration camp” in their midst, already talk of the day the jail will close, before it even opens.

Built next to the county’s jail for women at Las Colinas, the 580-bed jail is envisioned as a stopgap measure to alleviate crowding in the county’s other jails until permanent facilities are constructed in the early 1990s. After those jails are built, the county says, the men’s portion of Las Colinas will be closed, with the prefabricated barracks either being relocated or dismantled.

During often vitriolic hearings before the Board of Supervisors in 1987, county officials estimated that the temporary jail would be needed no more than seven years, assuming that plans for a 6,000-bed jail on east Otay Mesa and a new pretrial detention facility proceed on schedule.

But county administrators have hedged on that timetable by talking of possible uses for the Las Colinas barracks beyond 1996--a point that causes more than a little skepticism among Santee officials.

“We intend to make sure that the county lives up to that (seven-year) limit,” Santee Mayor Jack Doyle said. “What concerns us is that, historically, the county hasn’t lived up to its promises.”

If not exactly a detention nirvana, the $5.6-million Las Colinas jail does not conjure up Dickensian images of dark, dank cells. Because of its newness and its relatively pastoral setting at the edge of downtown Santee--with views of woods and mountains--the barracks-style jail most likely will quickly become the preferred address among county inmates, although they have little to say about where they end up.

Las Colinas’ biggest advantage over other county jails, Swink said, is that prisoners will have “a lot more elbow room.” Plans call for the jail’s inmate population to stay within its 580-bed capacity--a stark contrast with the county’s other jails, where the number of prisoners often is more than double the official capacity.

The inmate beds are arrayed in 10 wood-framed dormitories, most divided in half with 15 sheet-metal bunk beds on either side of a common area that includes showers and restrooms. (Twenty of the planned 600 beds were eliminated to make room for administrative needs.)

Well-manicured lawns surround the side-by-side barracks, with each dorm’s yard enclosed by an 8-foot-high, chain-link fence designed to keep its 60 inmates separate from other prisoners. The entire jail also is surrounded by a 12-foot-high fence--with razor wire across the top--and a 14-foot-high fence around the jail’s perimeter that is under 24-hour observation.

There are no bars anywhere within Las Colinas, a medium-security facility. During the day, the doors to the dormitories will be kept open, and the buildings’ windows may be opened by inmates as well.

“Inmates here will be able to get a lot of air, sun and natural light--things that are normally missing in most other jails,” Swink said. Inmates also will have access to telephones, a library and a recreation area that includes basketball courts, horseshoe pits, weight-lifting equipment and tetherball poles.

Each dormitory also includes two large color television sets. In some jails, Swink said, TV program selection is dictated by “the biggest guy or the guy with the most friends.” But, at Las Colinas, the unarmed deputies who will constantly mingle with the inmates will help mediate disagreements.

“If there are a lot of Mexican-Americans in one area and ‘Soul Train’ is on TV, we might get a hint that something’s amiss,” Swink said. “Or, you wouldn’t be very popular if you asked to watch ‘Wheel of Fortune’ while something like the Super Bowl is on.”

Beginning Monday, sheriff’s deputies plan to transport about 30 prisoners daily to Las Colinas, a schedule that will bring the jail to capacity in about one month. At the same time, the number of deputies will be increased, reaching about 100 when the jail is full.

Many of Las Colinas’ inmates will be new prisoners who otherwise would serve time in the county’s other jails, where crowding, in the words of Sheriff John Duffy, “passed the crisis point a long, long time ago.” As of last week, the inmate population in five county jails--a sixth, in Vista, is closed for expansion--totaled nearly 3,700, more than 2 1/2 times their official capacity of 1,470.

Although few current prisoners will be transferred from other jails, Las Colinas will help reduce crowding elsewhere through attrition, absorbing new inmates who otherwise would be placed in those other facilities, Swink said. In particular, many of Las Colinas’ inmates will be ones who normally would be held at Vista but who, because of that jail’s closure until this summer, now are housed in the South Bay jail.

Monday’s scheduled opening of the Santee jail follows a series of bitter legislative battles, protracted legal suits and frustrating last-minute shakedown problems that delayed the opening more than a year beyond its original target date.

When the supervisors approved the jail plan in July, 1987, county administrators predicted that the temporary barracks could be in place by late that year--an argument they persistently used to blunt Santee’s attempts to have the jail built elsewhere. The Las Colinas site, county officials argued, offered an immediate solution to an immediate problem, whereas any alternate location would take at least a year longer to develop.

Pointing Fingers

Now that Las Colinas is opening in 1989, and not in late 1987, Santee and county officials are pointing fingers at each other, trading “I-told-you-so’s” and blame.

From Santee’s viewpoint, the county’s original timetable was overly ambitious and unrealistic, put forth in a disingenuous effort to preclude serious consideration of other options. The county, though, insists that the jail could have been finished on time had Santee not tried so incessantly to block it through legislative and legal channels.

“It doesn’t surprise me that the county would try to blame us for its inability to make accurate projections,” Santee Mayor Doyle snapped. “This isn’t the first time that the county made statements that weren’t complete or accurate.”

Throughout the dispute, Santee officials and residents have complained about the jail’s nearness to schools, houses and a senior center--a fact that caused the county’s own environmental impact report to describe the jail as “incompatible with existing surrounding land uses.”

Appealing to the county’s own financial self-interest, Santee leaders also argue that the jail not only will undermine the city’s redevelopment efforts--one potential development already has been scuttled, Doyle said--but will dramatically reduce the value of the 371-acre county-owned tract on which the jail is situated as well.

“Once you’ve used your property for a sow’s ear, you will never be able to reap the benefits of a silk purse,” Santee City Manager Ronald Ballard said. County officials, though, contend that the temporary jail, which covers only 4 acres, will not damage the site’s long-range development potential.

Saying that their city already has borne is fair share of regional responsibilities, Santee leaders also emphasized that they already house the Las Colinas women’s jail, which recently underwent a 192-bed expansion, the Edgemoor geriatric and mental hospital and a water reclamation plant.

When Will It Close?

Having lost the “Will the jail be built?” battle, Santee’s focus has shifted to, “When will the jail be removed?” On the eve of the jail’s opening, officials express skepticism over whether the jail will, indeed, prove to be “temporary.”

To Santee leaders, the seven-year deadline cited by the supervisors when they approved the project stops short of an ironclad guarantee.

“It’s not like they’ve never broken their word to us before,” Santee city spokesman Bill Adams said. “It would be naive not to have any doubts about their intentions.”

During one of the many court hearings on the issue, a Superior Court judge indicated that any attempt by the county to extend the jail’s life would require a new environmental impact report. In that event, Santee would also be in a stronger legal position, the judge opined.

Nevertheless, many in Santee remain distrustful of the county and believe that, as Doyle put it, “This thing may not go away until we make it go away.”

Those concerns have been exacerbated by county officials’ periodic suggestions that the barracks might be used for expansions of the adjoining women’s jail or for other purposes on the site. For example, Rich Robinson, director of the county’s Special Projects Office, said that, if the barracks are still usable when male inmates are moved out in the 1990s, the buildings could be used as drug-control or alcohol detoxification centers, or for other programs “of a non-detentional nature.”

“When you look at those barracks now, there’s little justification for tearing them down,” Robinson said. “Of course, no one knows what they’re going to look like after thousands of inmates go through them. Whether they’re used after (the men’s jail) closes depends a lot on what kind of shape they’re in then.”

Distressed by such words, Santee leaders stress that they intend to keep a close eye on both the county and the calendar.

“There’s no chance of them slipping something by us,” Doyle said. “We’ve been on top of this from the beginning. And, if they need a reminder when the time’s up, we’ll be there to remind them--and, if necessary, the courts.”