Latinos Vow to Fight Prison Plan

Disappointed but undaunted, Eastside lawmakers and Latino activists vowed Thursday to keep up the fight against a proposed 1,450-bed state prison near downtown Los Angeles after Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a measure that would have killed funding for the controversial project.

“We don’t want our community turned into a penal colony,” said Aurora Castillo, treasurer and spokeswoman for Mothers of East L.A. “We’re going to continue to fight this because we know that right is on our side.”

” . . . Some of the people in the community feel a little betrayed,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, in whose district the prison would be located. “They were under the impression that he (Wilson) was open to listening to them and that never happened.”

Earlier this week, Wilson vetoed a measure, adopted last month by the Legislature, that would have transferred money earmarked for two new prisons in Los Angeles County--one southeast of downtown Los Angeles and one in Lancaster--to a prison proposed for Madera in the San Joaquin Valley.

The governor’s signing this week of the $55.7-billion state budget means that money is again available to build the downtown facility once lawsuits against the construction are resolved.

Roybal-Allard admitted that it would be “very difficult” to override Wilson’s veto, given the number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers from outside Los Angeles County who believe there should be state prisons here. The county accounts for 40% of the state’s 101,995 inmates.

There has been some opposition in the Lancaster area to that proposed prison. But it has been mild compared to the furor in the Los Angeles Latino community.

Eastside lawmakers and activists have fought the prison project--first proposed in 1985--arguing that the area has more than its fair share of jails, including the County Jail and the Sybil Brand Institute for Women.

East Los Angeles landscape architect Frank Villalobos, a leader in the fight against the facility, said the governor is sending the wrong message to the Latino community by restoring funding.

“He has a chance to say, ‘I really care about Latinos’ . . . because this prison is the most important issue to the Latino community right now,” Villalobos said. “But so far, he hasn’t said it.”

County Supervisor Gloria Molina called on Wilson to meet with area residents.

“We are not opposed to a prison in Los Angeles County,” she wrote in a statment issued Thursday. “We just feel that there are better sites for it.”

The governor’s office offered no clarification of Wilson’s stance on the proposal Thursday. During his gubernatorial campaign last year, Wilson said he did not want to build prisons where they are not wanted. But he ducked questions about whether he would go forward with the Los Angeles prison, which would be built on a 20-acre parcel near Washington Boulevard and Santa Fe Avenue.

Officials with the state Department of Corrections were happy with the governor’s veto.

“We have a very severe overcrowding problem in our current facility in Chino, which processes incoming inmates, many of them from Los Angles County,” said spokeswoman Christine May. “We desperately need a facility in Los Angeles County.”