Crowding Compounds the Pressure That Unarmed Jail Deputies Feel : Guards: Sheriff’s officials worry that the added burden of hustling prisoners through the system could lead to critical mistakes.

The deputies who run Orange County’s jails do not carry weapons: Sometimes, the only thing protecting them from inmates is what the sheriff’s academy teaches about “command presence.”

It is an authority that extends from the way they stand, the way they carry themselves, and their tone of voice when they speak to the men and women behind bars.

Most deputies come to their jobs--at a starting annual pay of $31,224--expecting the violence and meanness that accompanies the task of holding society’s accused or convicted troublemakers, officials say. They have been spit at, yelled at, and had their eyes scratched, hair pulled and badges torn off.

“It’s the profession you chose and you deal with it,” explained Deputy Margaret Cooper, who has worked in the Santa Ana Intake-Release Center five months.

But what they didn’t bargain for, deputies say, is the added pressure of having to hustle 90,000 prisoners a year through an overcrowded system as lawsuits and a federal court order loom in the background.

“There’s not a day that goes by that you don’t have to think about overcrowding,” Cooper said.

Orange County’s jails are built to hold 3,203 inmates. They currently house 4,400, however, and the system is almost always filled beyond capacity.

For the 1,380 deputies who operate the five jail facilities, it means every day is a race to shuffle people in and out of cells. And they must run that race within the confines of a court order and rules affirming the prisoners’ civil rights.

“The rubber band keeps stretching,” Assistant Sheriff Rocky Hewitt, in charge of jail operations, said. “As administrators, we are worried. I am looking over people’s shoulders to make sure they don’t make a mistake. They don’t want to make a mistake, but overcrowding creates more of a chance of error than ever before.”

All Orange County sheriff’s deputies are required to start their careers with a stint at the jail. It usually lasts two years but can be shorter or longer depending on the staffing on patrol units, where jail deputies go next.

Officials consider it good preparation for dealing with criminal suspects on the street.

“Jail duty is the toughest job any law enforcement officer can have,” Hewitt believes.

California jails in all but three counties are run by a sheriff’s department. In Orange County, deputies get two weeks of jail training in addition to the normal 24 weeks of police academy instruction.

Jail deputies are never armed because weapons only present a temptation to inmates, who routinely outnumber their keepers. Maintaining order instead relies on a deputy’s intelligence and experience.

“They learn that communication skill, that sixth sense,” Sgt. Jim Estep said recently as he and three young deputies talked about their jail experience.

But attorneyes for inmates say that the command presence of deputies can sometimes cross over into mistreatment.

In June, U.S. District Judge William P. Gray responded to complaints filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in behalf of inmates who charged that they had been subjected to “verbal and psychological abuse.”

Gray told sheriff’s officials to make sure deputies refrained from any abuse.

“The court is fully aware that ‘psychological abuse’ is not a one-way street and that sheriff’s deputies are subjected to verbal abuse that tempts them sorely to respond in kind,” Gray wrote the county counsel. “Nonetheless, sheriff’s deputies must maintain their professional demeanor at all times, and any deputy that is unable to do so must be disciplined or removed.”

Earlier this month, ACLU lawyers complained that inmates are not given enough access to legal materials and law libraries.

“Because of the hard-nosed, insensitive treatment of prisoners as objects rather than human beings,” the lawyer’s wrote, “virtually every prisoner feels they have a complaint against their jailers.”

Jail officials say, however, that they have followed the judge’s order, and that the Orange County jails are among the best run in the nation.