Lawyer for Inmates Argues Against Plan to Shorten Jail Visiting Hours

A lawyer for Orange County inmates argued Thursday that state law demands that local jailers actually lengthen visiting hours for many prisoners, rather than slash them by more than half, as they are doing now.

Attorney Dick Herman said the “evolving standard of human decency” dictates that inmates be allowed frequent, if not daily contact with friends and family. He also predicted that the jail system’s new visiting policy will produce “fights, tussles, and tensions” among stressed inmates.

At the closing of a hearing in Santa Ana, U.S. District Judge Gary Taylor took the motion under submission and is likely to rule early next week, officials said. Herman and other civil liberties’ attorneys for the inmates are asking him to restore more visiting hours in county jails.

By this weekend, the Sheriff’s Department will have completed its two-week transition to a new visiting schedule, which will mean less than half as many hours for the system’s 4,700 inmates. At four of the county’s five jail sites, visiting days will be cut from four days a week to two.

Sheriff’s Department officials say the county’s budget crisis is to blame.

“We’re not wiping out visiting,” Deputy County Counsel Jim Turner, said during the hearing. “The opportunity for visiting is there; all there is, is a reduction in visits.”

In any case, Turner added, “there is no Constitutional right to visitation.”

Judge Taylor last week denied a request by the inmates for a temporary restraining order blocking the new policy, saying he did not find that it violated “contemporary standards of decency” or state law.

But he scheduled Thursday’s hearing on a motion for a preliminary junction to more fully explore the issue.

The federal court battle is seen as important not only in determining the future of inmates’ visitation, but also in gauging Taylor’s broader handling of the long-running jail litigation, which dates back to the 1970s.

Taylor took over the jail case last year from the late U.S. District Judge William P. Gray, who over the years ordered better living conditions and less crowding in jail and earned a reputation as a protector of inmates’ rights.

As Taylor engaged in legal sparring with Herman and Turner over the visitation issue Thursday, the judge provided a glimpse into his own philosophy on the court’s role in the jail problem.

As judge in the issue, Taylor said, there always will be a tension between effectively “managing” the jails himself from the bench and leaving the Sheriff’s Department an independent reign.

“That’s the see-saw, back and forth,” he said. “The court’s job is to look and see when the jails are doing something that violates the Constitution,” he said.

In the visitation issue, Herman argued, the Sheriff’s Department is violating state law, if not the Constitution.

He cited a recent state Court of Appeal decision that found that a Los Angeles city jail must provide twice-daily visiting time for its inmates who have not been arraigned. Hundreds of inmates each day in the Orange County jails are also awaiting arraignment and deserve those same rights, he said.