REGIONAL REPORT : Smoking Ban in Jail Is a Bummer for Inmates : Health: The rule is becoming the norm in Southland lockups and across the nation. But cigarettes are also the prisoners’ contraband of choice.

In the harsh, concrete world of the jail here, Bill Hughes has measured his days partly by how much nicotine he could inhale.

Cigarettes were golden for Hughes, a 28-year-old convicted methamphetamine salesman. He had not had the money to buy his own in the jail commissary for weeks so he got them where he could--bumming them off other inmates (“C’mon, I’m cool,” he implored) or trading.

Recently, Hughes managed to trade six postage stamps that his wife sent him for six cigarettes; he wanted two cigarettes per stamp, but he took what the market would bear. Desperation ruled.

But the future will yield no more cigarettes for Hughes and his fellow inmates. Today, Orange County’s jails became the latest in the health-crazed ‘90s to ban smoking for inmates and jail employees.

Once as much a part of jails as iron bars and drab jumpsuit uniforms, cigarettes are being outlawed in a growing number of facilities nationwide. As many as 40% of detention centers have banned smoking since 1988, according to some estimates.

Among more than 3,500 county and municipal jails nationwide, such bans have become the norm. Many newly opened facilities ban smoking and so do large jail systems in Los Angeles County, Cook County in the Chicago area, King County in the Seattle area and Dade County in Florida. State and federal facilities have been slower to pick up the trend, but some are phasing in changes as well, officials say.

“This is really a phenomenon that is picking up speed, snowballing, and it’s spreading around the country in numbers and popularity,” said Wayne Huggins, director of the U. S. National Institute of Corrections in Washington.

“It’s the whole healthier attitude and smoke-free mentality that drove this,” he said. “It’s a sign of the times, and it’s only a matter of time before most (jails) are doing it.”

A few inmate lawsuits around the country have challenged the smoking ban as cruel and unusual punishment. But Dick Ford, executive director of the American Jail Assn., said the lawsuits have “gone nowhere.”

National authorities and sheriff’s department officials in Los Angeles, Riverside, Ventura and San Diego counties, where smoking bans have been imposed in jails, describe the no-smoking policy as a resounding success. Some point to decreases in employee sick days, jail fires and wear and tear on facilities as byproducts of the smoking ban.

A recent report by the National Institute of Corrections found that the much-predicted tensions among jail smokers have produced few problems.

“Rebellion on the part of staff and inmates (has been) less than expected,” the report stated.

In Los Angeles County, Cmdr. Robert Pash of the Sheriff’s Department said: “There were a lot of doomsayers who predicted insurrections and riots and all that, but that never happened. The transition has been smooth.”

But with the no-smoking move in many jails has come a trade-off: the black market. In many facilities, cigarettes are replacing drugs and weapons as the contraband of choice.

“All of the ways that inmates try to smuggle drugs into jail, it’s the same for cigarettes,” said Jim Painter, director of detention services for San Diego County’s 4,000-inmate jail system.

Pash, who helped institute Los Angeles County’s ban last September, said: “That’s probably been our biggest problem, the black market issue, especially in a system as large as ours.”

The NIC study found that cigarette use or possession now makes up 15% of all infractions in some nonsmoking jails.

Visitors throw cigarette packs over fences. Jail trustees working outside the facility hide them behind designated bushes. And even deputies and jail employees have been found to smuggle in cartons for cash.

In Los Angeles, as many as eight jail employees--including one deputy--have been fired or have resigned since September for allegedly selling cigarettes to inmates, Pash said.

Inmates appear to be the most common smuggling source, stashing away cigarettes before they are taken into custody or while out of the jail making court appearances.

It is not hard to do, said Martin Kunkel, 20, of Norwalk, who has been in and out of lockups since age 15 on auto theft and burglary charges. Once, he managed to smuggle cigarettes into the Los Angeles County Jail by hiding them in a bodily orifice. He sold one inside for $15. Other smugglers are more prolific, he said, and there is always a demand.

“The cigarettes calm you down,” said Kunkel, now incarcerated in the Orange County Jail in Santa Ana. “There’s a lot of pressure in here, thinking about the things you can’t do. It’s a tension relief.”

The going rate today in Los Angeles County Jail is $50 to $75 for a pack of cigarettes, Pash said. An extra buck buys a match.

Demand is so high in nonsmoking facilities that inmates often go to creative lengths to get a smoke, jail officials say.

In Riverside County Jail, deputies have found dried tea leaves that inmates try to smoke. Other inmates with access to washers and dryers have taken cabbage leaves from dinner, dried them out, rolled them in paper and smoked them, said Capt. Charlotte Boytor, commander of Riverside’s Robert Presley Detention Center.

Jailhouse smokers have helped bring the ban on themselves through an indifference to concerns over secondhand smoke, some officials suggest.

Nonsmoking inmates make up a small minority in many jails; by some estimates, up to 80% of some inmate groups smoke, compared with about 28% of the general population in California. And smoking inmates are often the first to admit that nonsmokers’ rights are not a priority.

Some smokers have welcomed the ban. “I can’t wait for it to happen--that’s the only way I’ll quit,” said Richard Boyer, a former Death Row inmate who is awaiting retrial in Orange County in the slaying of a Fullerton couple.

Others are more grudging.

“I don’t understand how they can impose on your rights that far,” said Michael Woodall, 30, of Yucca Valley, jailed in Santa Ana for cocaine possession. “But basically, I guess you don’t have any rights in jail, and I’m beginning to understand that now.”