Big House in the Back Yard : Prisons: Lancaster fears the high-desert shadow of a maximum-security fortress, but cities such as Folsom and Ione have found that housing projects and prison walls can make good neighbors--some of the time.

Lt. Patricia Mandeville advances through the horde of blue uniforms in the recreation yard of the Mule Creek State Prison at Ione, near Sacramento. The slim, bespectacled woman in a raincoat is tracked by the stares of hundreds of inmates lifting weights or hanging out on a cold, sunny day.

Mandeville climbs into the second-story control booth of a 200-bed housing unit, where another officer next to a rack of semiautomatic rifles watches inmates. Barred gun apertures in the glass command a clear field of fire at the floor of the unit and the two tiers of cells.

On the concrete wall, a three-word advisory to inmates sets the tone: “No Warning Shot.”

Across the road from the prison, from the gun towers and fences topped with barbed wire, a sign posted in a meadow says: “Coming soon. Castle Oaks Country Club Estates.”

A Bay Area developer wants to spend $20 million on an upscale development in the tiny Gold Rush country town of Ione. Plans call for 700 houses at prices of up to $250,000, along with 220 multifamily units, a motel, a commercial and civic center, and an 18-hole golf course.

The juxtaposition of housing development and prison walls in Ione and other prison communities could happen in Lancaster one day, but only if a plan to build a 2,200-bed, maximum- and medium-security prison in the high desert overcomes widespread local opposition. Lancaster leaders say the prison would hurt rapidly growing property values and development, as well as damage the Antelope Valley’s image as an affordable suburban refuge.

The city of Lancaster and Los Angeles County sued the state Department of Corrections in January to block the Lancaster prison, authorized in a 1987 compromise between Gov. George Deukmejian and Democratic legislators. A planned East Los Angeles prison authorized by that accord has also been the subject of a lawsuit.

Deukmejian calls the resistance irresponsible because the county produces 38% of the state’s 88,500 prison inmates but incarcerates none, and the prison population has almost doubled in five years.

In addition to possible economic damage, prison opponents in Lancaster fear the potential for escapes and for crime committed by visitors, parolees and relatives of inmates who move to the area. They predict new strain on already overburdened infrastructure, such as courts, roads and the water supply.

Corrections officials dismiss the charges and assert that prisons have proven to be clean, safe and economically beneficial.

To gain perspective on the debate, The Times examined four communities with state prisons: Folsom, Chino, Avenal and Ione. Overall, the experiences of the four cities support government and private studies conducted in California, Florida, Wisconsin and Alabama on two key issues. Prisons are not perceived to have caused serious crime problems, or to have harmed property values and development.

Nevertheless, accounts of prison-connected criminal activity may raise particular safety concerns in the Antelope Valley because of Lancaster’s location on the crest of Los Angeles County’s urban sprawl. And Chino leaders, who feel that the city’s growth and image have suffered for years, have urged that their prison be closed.

In economically depressed cities, where residents expected prison jobs and contracts to spawn an economic boom, there is some disappointment. Additionally, county officials throughout the state confirmed a major concern of officials in the Lancaster courts, where felony crime filings jumped from 861 in 1987 to 1,344 last year. Crime and other activity inside prisons generate new headaches for legal systems.

The phenomenon is a product of rising street crime and population, combined with tough sentencing laws, that have locked the state into its prison-building drive and into political fights such as the one in Lancaster.

FOLSOM

Folsom, a suburb of 25,000 residents 22 miles northeast of Sacramento, is the 11th-fastest growing city in the state. It had the state’s fourth-largest increase in assessed valuation from 1984 to 1988, rising to a total of more than $1 billion, according to the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy.

Custom-built homes and construction sites ring the green hills around the 112-year-old maximum-security prison that holds 6,500 “guests,” as the Chamber of Commerce magazine describes them.

Michael Winn, a developer building houses priced between $180,000 and $245,000, said: “You almost can’t build to too high a market out here. . . . The home buyers can see the towers; they can see the lights. They don’t seem fazed at all.”

A wildlife area provides a buffer around the prison grounds. Folsom Prison’s historic East Gate, a scene setter for many prison movies, overlooks a tourist museum and a gift shop selling artwork by murderers and rapists. Instead of playing down its prison identity, Folsom celebrates it.

Sixty percent of Folsom inmates are serving life sentences, 30% of that group with no possibility of parole. Mayor Jack Kipp, whose grandfathers were high-ranking officials at Folsom, lives in a sumptuous house on a hill within view of the prison--and within earshot of its public address system. Kipp said that having maximum-security inmates makes the prison more secure and therefore safer for its neighbors.

“And the economic benefits are terrific,” he said.

Kipp and other officials tour prospective prison cities extolling their experience to sometimes hostile audiences. They say Folsom reaps almost $900,000 a year from population-based tax revenues that include inmates as city residents; from joint solid waste, sewer and ambulance services, and from free streets and parks labor by minimum-security prison work crews.

The city is also getting into the prison business on its own. It has contracted with the state to build and run a for-profit Return to Custody facility to house up to 400 parole violators.

Folsom’s police chief, Harold Barker, attributes Folsom’s low crime rate partly to the presence of 2,000 correctional officers going to and from work. He described them as both a passive and active deterrent, estimating that he writes four or five commendation letters a year for off-duty prison officers who have assisted a police officer or helped citizens who have been victims of crime or traffic accidents.

While visitors are periodically arrested at the prison for attempting to smuggle drugs to inmates, for outstanding warrants and for committing other crimes common to prison visits, they do not commit crimes elsewhere in the city, Barker said. High housing costs are believed to have discouraged families from moving in to be close to inmates, he said. And officials said few parolees have settled in town or caused problems in the community.

There have been two escapes in the past 10 years, both by murderers, said prison spokeswoman Lt. Cammy Voss.

One inmate rode out on a delivery truck in 1984 and remains at large. The other escaped through the sewer system in 1987 and was captured in Mexico. The prison’s adjoining minimum-security work camps experience several “walkaways” a year, Voss said.

Barker said escapees committed no “heinous crimes. . . . They got out of town with all possible haste.”

Barker acknowledges that the impact of crimes committed in Folsom on the local courts is “a costly piece of the system. The inmates will commit crimes inside the facility just to get outside and take a ride.”

David P. Druliner, an assistant chief deputy in the Sacramento County district attorney’s office, said Folsom generates enough of a workload that his office has considered assigning one prosecutor exclusively to prison cases. The office has investigated an average of 672 cases a year referred from Folsom since 1985, filed an average of 134 felony complaints and received an average of about $73,000 in state reimbursements per fiscal year.

Although the state is supposed to reimburse all costs, Druliner was among court officials who said that reimbursements do not fully compensate expenses because monitoring prison-related work is problematic.

“Whether we are claiming the total that would be due to us from the state, I can guarantee you that we are not,” he said. “It is difficult to get everyone to log in the hours they spend on those cases for reimbursement. That is time-consuming in itself.”

CHINO

The two images that represented Chino to the outside world for many years were cows and prisons, residents say.

The San Bernardino County city of 57,000 has housed the California Institution for Men since 1941. Bordered by a large concentration of dairies, CIM has 6,400 inmates and serves as a reception center for Southern California inmates while they are processed for placement elsewhere. Nearby are the Youth Training School for juveniles, a women’s prison and the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco.

“We have more than our fair share,” Mayor Fred Aguiar said. “We went through a very long period of time of having a prison community image. I think Chino did not develop as rapidly because of that image.”

But growth emanating from Los Angeles and Orange counties has brought almost 20,000 new residents in the last 10 years, along with intense home construction. The average 1988 home price in the Chino Hills--an unincorporated area of 40,000 about a mile west of the prison--was $159,138, second-highest of the seven communities that make up the Inland Empire West. Chino ranked fourth, with an average price of $129,169 in 1988.

The crime rate has dropped considerably from a peak reached in the early 1980s, the result of violent street gangs, which police say have since become largely dormant.

But the period of serious crime in the city had links to the prison, notably to prison gangs, parolees and relatives of inmates who moved to town, according to authorities.

Aguiar said: “I think there’s no question that there was a direct connection between the gang activity in the city of Chino and the prison inmates.”

Chino Police Detective Steve Bechman said street gangs formed alliances with members of La Nuestra Familia, a gang of Latino inmates from Northern California. Some prison gang members paroled in the city joined in local drug and gang activity.

A detective in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Prison Gang investigative unit, who asked not to be identified, said prison gangs frequently direct outside drug traffic, robbery and extortion operations. That issue is of special interest to Lancaster because the city lies on the edge of urban expansion and because its crime and gang problems have increased.

The danger for Lancaster has diminished somewhat, the detective said, because corrections officers have made progress in suppressing the major prison gangs: the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family, La Nuestra Familia and Mexican Mafia. The members are being isolated in a new, remote, top-security prison at Pelican Bay near the Oregon border.

Prison gang members have more control over outside crime than do inmates who belong to street gangs, the detective said. Street gang members maintain communication with their gangs while in prison, but are less able to “call the shots,” he said.

The trouble from parolees that Chino experienced could occur in Lancaster as well, the detective said. State law requires that parolees return to their county of commitment. Only about 10% gain exemptions based on safety, job opportunities or family resettlement, officials said. At a Lancaster prison there would be no restriction on parolees resettling in the Antelope Valley if they are from Los Angeles County, parole officials said.

As in other counties, San Bernardino County judicial experts said prisons cause court expenses that are not fully reimbursed because the state does not pay for such items as capital improvements. Superior Court Judge Duke D. Rouse said he spends 97 days a year on his calendar reviewing writs filed by inmates protesting everything from food quality to parole status. He said the reimbursement process is slow.

“It takes years before you get the money,” he said.

Corrections spokeswoman Judith McGillivray said county officials exaggerate the problem.

An ongoing controversy in Chino concerns a 180-bed ward for prisoners with AIDS. The ward received opposition from the community before its opening in 1988, and the announcement of a planned expansion has stirred new anger. Corrections Department Director James Rowland will attend a City Council meeting this month to discuss the ward’s future.

Another controversy has faded, but many residents said its wounds have not healed. In 1983, inmate Kevin Cooper escaped from the minimum-security area of the prison. He spent three days hiding in an empty house on a Chino Hills ranch, then invaded the house next door and killed four people. The case led to statewide scrutiny of prison-community communications and implementation of tougher security and new community alert systems at the prison.

Walkaway escapes continue, as they do at all prisons. Spokesman Lt. Ron Blakely said there were five in 1989 and four in 1988, none of which sent his phone ringing off the hook the way it did in the years after Kevin Cooper.

The house on the hill where Cooper hid before the slayings remains empty. Larry and Sue Lease, neighbors of Cooper’s victims, have left it locked, lighted and equipped with a burglar alarm. Whenever there is a prison escape, Sue Lease said, some of the old anger returns.

City and business leaders suggested pointedly that it is time for the aging, overcrowded CIM to close, sell its land and put prisons in communities that want them.

“They could liquidate that asset and build prison facilities throughout the state for the cash they get,” Aguiar said. “We recognize that it will be a long process. But because of the economic growth of the area, it should be phased out and relocated.”

McGillivray said there can be no discussion of closing prisons while new prisons are desperately needed.

AVENAL

In the Central Valley farming town of Avenal, oil had become a ghost industry years earlier. Agriculture, in the words of Nick Ivans, the town pharmacist, had “taken a tumble.”

In the mid-1980s, the town had 5,000 residents, half Anglo and half Latino. Avenal was dying--until Ivans noticed a newspaper article about the state’s massive prison construction agenda.

Ivans told a Chamber of Commerce meeting: “I know of an industry for Avenal. It’s clean and it never closes down and it runs 24 hours a day.”

People laughed at first. Then they got serious. They mounted a successful campaign to bring a prison to town and they got excited: Prison jobs and spending were going to start a renaissance.

Their excitement has subsided, however.

The “low-medium” security facility opened three years ago and holds about 3,900 prisoners, mostly drug offenders serving short sentences. One-fourth of them are women. It employs 984 workers.

A new apartment complex down the road from the prison is jokingly referred to as an extension of the prison because so many prison officers live there. Inmate crews have done more than $200,000 worth of free labor around town, including remodeling a movie theater. The state spent several million dollars to upgrade water and sewage treatment plants.

“The prison saved this town,” Ivans said, calling the improvement in the economy slow but steady.

Avenal Community Development Director Bruce Barnes is less enthusiastic.

“The prison hasn’t had the impact everyone had hoped for,” he said. “Everybody expected an influx of people.”

Only about 150 prison workers settled in Avenal. Most commute long distances from other towns. And as prison community relations director Ramiro Munoz will admit, the few contracts that local businesses obtained through the centralized state purchasing system in Sacramento amount to peanuts.

There was not enough early effort to hire locals, Munoz said. Nor was there enough education of businesses about the process of qualifying and bidding for prison contracts, something Munoz said he is trying to change.

Guadalupe Lopez works the counter at Rogers Cafe, a Mexican and American diner where people move in small-town slow motion. She thinks that the prison has been a disappointment.

“Business is very low right now,” she said in Spanish. “There wasn’t as much as they thought there would be. There isn’t even a bank. The boss has to go to Coalinga to deposit money.”

The forlorn Bonita American development embodies Avenal’s frustrations. The developer acquired enough space for 200 single-family lots, expecting prison workers and others attracted by economic activity to snap up houses at prices between $65,000 and $85,000, which is high in Avenal. Today, the tract has only 50 homes; they overlook rows of empty lots.

A miniature construction boom peaked in 1987 when 100 housing units were built in town, including 46 homes. But no apartments have been built since, and only 18 houses were built last year. The bank left. The shopping center never came.

The lack of amenities in town played a role in keeping prison workers away, as did greed. While young prison workers could not buy homes because they were not yet permanent employees, other staff believed that business people jacked up prices recklessly.

For example, Munoz said he tried to persuade a prison employee to buy a home in Avenal, only to discover that the $54,000 price tag had shot up.

“They were asking $76,000 less than a year later,” he said. “She went to Coalinga and bought a bigger house for less money.”

The Kings County courts, welfare and school systems have felt the impact of staff and inmate families from Avenal and from a new maximum-security prison at Corcoran. In a well-publicized case, a Los Angeles teen-ager visiting his girlfriend in Hanford--where her family had moved to be near a relative serving time at Avenal half an hour away--gunned down a bus station clerk in a robbery attempt.

But the incident did not stir an uproar. Crime in Avenal remains moderate. Locals have encouraged an expansion that will bring 2,400 new inmates.

“If the prison hadn’t been built, the town would be much worse off than it is,” Barnes said. “It would have withered up and died.”

IONE

Generations of Ione residents have worked at the Preston School of Industry, a California Youth Authority facility for hard-core juvenile offenders, who some consider more dangerous than adult felons.

So the advent of Mule Creek State Prison caused only minor rumblings in 1987. Initial doubts were allayed by the economic prospects for a town 50 miles southeast of Sacramento that has a quaint old Main Street of wooden cafes and bars and about 2,700 residents, if you subtract the 3,490 inmates.

“The attitude was sort of complacent, blase,” City Manager Merrell Watts said.

It still is. People around town describe the prison as a benefit that is still emerging, a minor disappointment, nothing extreme.

The area has prospered, according to prison officials. They supplied statistics showing that the prison has spent millions of dollars in Amador County. They said 60% of the prison workers live in a 40-mile radius, 20% live in Amador County and 5% live in Ione.

Watts and others said they expected more local hires. Merchants complained that not enough prison workers have moved to town or spent their money at local businesses. Watts contends that other than one ambitious development plan and scattered residential housing proposals, an economic boom has yet to materialize.

“The prison is not a major impetus or obstacle to development,” he said. “There has been a modest rise in property values.”

On the other hand, Councilwoman Loreta Tillery, who owns Tilly’s bar on Main Street and is a member of the prison’s citizens advisory committee, said the impact has been positive.

“When they first started, only a small percentage of local people were hired,” she said. “But it has gone up. The prison is bending over backward to do more. . . . It has been a shot in the arm.”

The main complaint from neighbors of the prison is the tall floodlights, which send up a nighttime glow that can be seen for miles. Prison officials said they may turn down the lights or outfit them with shades.

The lights did not prevent developer Pete Denevi from proposing his Castle Oaks Country Club development across from Mule Creek. Denevi said the golf course community is targeted to retirees who are immigrating to the Gold Rush country from urban areas and upscale suburbanites looking for a country home. He does not think that they will be deterred by the grim outpost of reality next door.

A LOOK AT FIVE PRISON SITES IN CALIFORNIA

FOLSOM STATE PRISON Security Level: Maximum City: Folsom (pop. 25,000) Closest Metro Area: Sacramento-22 miles Design Capacity: 3,796 Inmate Pop.: 6,560 Percent occupied: 172% Staff: 2,110

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTION fOR MEN Security Level: Minimum/Medium, plus Reception Center (all levels) City: Chino (pop. 57,000) Closest Metro Area: Los Angeles-40 miles Design Capacity: 3,746 Inmate Pop.: 6,403 Percent occupied: 230% Staff: 1,777

AVENAL STATE PRISON Security Level: Low Medium City: Avenal (pop. 5,500) Closest Metro Area: Fresno-65 miles Design Capacity: 3,034 Inmate Pop.: 3,900 Percent occupied: 129% Staff: 984

MULE CREEK STATE PRISON Security Level: High Medium City: Ione (pop. 2,700) Closest Metro Area: Sacramento-50 miles Design Capacity: 1,700 Inmate Pop.: 3,491 Percent occupied: 205% Staff: 744

PROPOSED LANCASTER PRISON Security Level: Maximum, High Medium City: Lancaster (pop. 90,000) Closest Metro Area: Los Angeles-70 miles Design Capacity: 2,200 Inmate Pop.: Percent occupied: Projected up to 190% Staff: Up to 1,157