New Jails Not Answer, ACLU Says : Group’s Solution: Keep People Out in the First Place

There were no long faces last week around the offices of the American Civil Liberties Union when a plan to help finance new jail construction in Orange County with a half-cent sales tax fell apart.

Although the ACLU has sued the county to relieve severe overcrowding in the main Orange County Jail for men, its members say new jails aren’t the answer. The solution, they insist, is keeping people out of jail in the first place.

“Everybody seems to think that the best way to deal with overcrowding is to build your way out of it,” said Rebecca Jurado, an ACLU attorney who monitors conditions in the County Jail for the group.

“Building more jails has become a national trend, the preferred method for dealing with too many inmates and not enough beds. It’s simply the wrong approach.”

Jurado said the money used to construct multimillion-dollar jails and prisons should be spent on job-training programs or more drug rehabilitation centers for the poor and unemployed. The way to ease jail overcrowding, she said, is to reduce the number of people who commit crimes.

Building a new jail, she said, simply creates an incentive to fill it, without attacking the real problem.

“We’ve got to have more jobs so people can earn an income and stay out of trouble,” Jurado said. “That’s where our emphasis should be. But in this county, that’s not the case.”

County officials had been hoping that legislation by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) would pave the way for a ballot measure asking voters to approve a half-cent sales tax increase. The tax would generate about $100 million a year.

Reacting to the bill’s initial demise, Jurado said, “I don’t think it’s a great loss.”

Still, she said, the ACLU would be concerned if it meant delays in building new courtrooms or expansion of existing court facilities. A shortage of court space, Jurado said, means many inmates are held in custody longer than they should be, contributing to jail overcrowding.

A year ago, U.S. District Judge William P. Gray ended a 13-year-old lawsuit brought by the ACLU over overcrowding in Orange County.

The decade-old class-action lawsuit, which at one point prompted the judge to threaten contempt of court orders against the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Brad Gates for failing to end jail overcrowding, has been a major factor in some decisions in the county, including construction of several new jail facilities and choosing locations for others.

It also spawned a number of court orders on the treatment of prisoners and the jail’s capacity, which Gray has kept in place.