Gates Assails County Report on Solutions for Jail Crisis : Overcrowding: It ‘regurgitates’ information, the sheriff says, adding that a proposal for double-bunking to add 358 beds at the Theo Lacy facility would be illegal.

A frustrated Sheriff Brad Gates on Monday assailed portions of a long-awaited report on Orange County’s jail crisis, saying it “only regurgitates everything we’ve said before.”

In his first interview since the report was released by the county administrator’s office last Friday, Gates used some of his most caustic language to date on the jail overcrowding dilemma in asserting that the county recommendations don’t go far enough to address the problem.

“We need a jail now,” he said. “We’re putting criminals on the street every day, and that’s not a good thing.”

Gates’ response--which surprised some county officials--could prove yet another roadblock in the difficult and decade-long task of finding even a short-term solution to the county’s mounting jail problems.

In the report released last week, the county staff recommended that the Board of Supervisors spend millions of dollars to add 358 beds--and look to add more than 500 beds later--at the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange.

If implemented, the plans would nearly double the size of the Theo Lacy facility. For that reason, the recommendations have already drawn sharp criticism from officials in Orange and from Supervisor Don R. Roth, whose district includes Theo Lacy.

The Theo Lacy expansion would cost about $487,000 initially, plus $4.5 million a year for operations, the county estimates. About one in every five dollars in the county’s budget would be going toward jail operations if the program were approved.

The report also recommends that the county explore further community work-furlough programs, electronic home confinement and other means of lessening the jail population. But it rejects as too costly and time-consuming an expansion of the James A. Musick Branch Jail near Lake Forest.

The report is designed to provide short-term options to ease jail overcrowding. Long-term alternatives, thrown into doubt last October when supervisors abandoned plans for a new jail in Gypsum Canyon, are to come later.

The report, hailed throughout county government as a way of getting back on track after the Gypsum Canyon debacle, was billed as a “multi-departmental effort” that included the Sheriff’s Department and other agencies.

In an interview Monday, Gates acknowledged that he and his aides took part in the report’s development but he was quick to distance himself from its final form, saying that was a product of the county administrative office.

For instance, he said he was unaware of one final recommendation in the report that would have the Sheriff’s Department double-bunk inmates at the Theo Lacy jail in order to house an additional 358 people.

He said such a move would be “not legal” under the terms of a state bonding agreement that provided funding for construction of a current expansion project at Theo Lacy. The agreement requires Orange County to leave a third of its jail cells for single occupancy, Gates said.

More importantly, Gates said, the report “regurgitates everything we’ve said before” and avoids the larger question of where to put another jail in Orange County to house an inmate population now averaging 4,400 a day.

County officials “keep saying, ‘It can go here’ and ‘It can go here’--well, where will it go?” Gates said.

“I’m frustrated,” he said. “It’s easy to do a report and send it to the board. . . . But until we get additional jail beds, we’ve got a very serious situation that could blow up on us.”

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez said that he had understood that Gates was pleased with the report, and that he was caught off guard by the sheriff’s comments as reported to him.

“I’m surprised,” Vasquez said. “I thought we were on the same wavelength.”

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said he shared Gates’ intentions in trying to get a new jail as soon as possible, but added: “If we had the funds to do that, there’s no one who wouldn’t be willing to move forward.

“We’ve been after that for a very long time,” he said. “It’s very nice not to have to make the difficult decisions.”