REGIONAL REPORT : Orange County Joins Pack, Banning Cigarettes in Jail : Health: A growing number of U.S. detention centers prohibit smoking. Inmate suits have had little effect.

In the harsh, concrete world of the jail here, Bill Hughes measured his days partly by how much nicotine he could suck into his lungs. And for the 28-year-old convicted methamphetamine salesman, one recent day had been “real good.”

The tally: six cigarettes.

Cigarettes were golden for Hughes. He didn’t have 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.

On this day, Hughes managed to trade six postage stamps that his wife sent him in exchange for six cigarettes. He wanted two cigarettes per stamp, but he took what the market would bear. Desperation ruled.

Tomorrow may yield no cigarettes, but Hughes wasn’t worrying about that. “I smoke ‘em when I get ‘em,” he said. “Right there. I don’t save none of it. Well, I might save the butt, and when I get four or five left, I’ll roll another cigarette.”

Such is the life of a smoker in jail. But all that becomes a threatened existence starting today as Orange County’s five jails become the latest in the health-crazed ‘90s to ban smoking altogether for both inmates and jail employees.

Once as much a part of a jailhouse as iron bars and drab jump-suit uniforms, cigarettes are now being outlawed in a growing number of facilities nationwide--in as many as 40% of detention centers since 1988, according to some estimates.

Among more than 3,500 county and municipal jails nationwide, no-smoking bans have become the norm. Many newly opened facilities prohibit smoking and so do large jail systems such as the ones in Los Angeles County, 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 now 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,” Wayne Huggins, director of the U.S. National Institute of Corrections in Washington, said in an interview.

“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 scattered through the country have challenged the smoking ban as cruel and unusual punishment. But as Dick Ford, executive director of the American Jail Assn., said, the lawsuits so far have “gone nowhere.”

“Now, it’s just accepted practice,” he said.

National authorities and sheriff’s department officials in Los Angeles, Riverside, Ventura and San Diego counties describe the no-smoking policies as resounding successes. Some point to decreases in employee sick days, jail fires and wear and tear on facilities as byproducts of the smoking bans.

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

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

But with the no-smoking movement 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,” concedes Jim Painter, director of detention services for San Diego County’s 4,000-inmate jail system.

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

In fact, 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 predesignated 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 resigned since September for allegedly selling cigarettes to inmates, Pash said.

But the inmates themselves appear to be the most common smuggling source, hiding away cigarettes either before they are taken into custody or while out of the jail making court appearances.

It’s not hard to do, said Martin Kunkel, 20, of Norwalk, who has been in and out of lockups since age 15 on various auto theft and burglary charges.

While he was in jail in Los Angeles through January, Kunkel said, he once managed to smuggle some cigarettes into the jail in a bodily orifice. He sold one inside for $15. Other smugglers are more prolific, he said, and there’s always a demand now.

“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, Cmdr. 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.

Some inmates have been known to wipe nicotine residue off smoke-stained walls, rolling the remnants in toilet paper or Bible pages, according to jail inmates who have witnessed the practice.

In Riverside County Jail, deputies have even 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.

“They’re very ingenious,” Boytor said.

The irony of the cigarette ban is that jailhouse smokers have helped bring the ban on themselves through an indifference to concerns over second-hand smoke, some jail officials suggest.

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

Robert Young, 37, of Irvine, incarcerated in Orange County Jail in Santa Ana on petty theft charges, laughed when asked whether he and other smokers in the county’s five jails try to accommodate the concerns of nonsmoking inmates.

“This is a jailhouse,” he quipped. “This isn’t the Marriott.”

Some smokers have actually 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 double-slaying of a Fullerton couple.

But even some nonsmoking inmates believe that their jailers are going too far.

Thomas F. Maniscalco, an Orange County murder defendant, said that as a former smoker, he’ll be glad to breathe some fresh air for a change. The smoke “makes me nauseous, it makes my eyes run, and it’s probably subjecting me to serious risks of harm,” he said.

But Maniscalco said the county should have adopted a more moderate approach, confining smoking to certain areas of the jails, for instance. Instead, he predicted that the all-out ban--combined with a substantial cut in visiting hours--will spell trouble.

“I don’t expect to see the Whiskey Rebellion or the Boston Tea Party,” said Maniscalco, who led inmates’ complaints in 1990 over bland jail food in the county jails, prompting the Sheriff’s Department to serve more Mexican cuisine.

“But I expect to see a tremendous amount of problems . . . because you have people who are going to be under a tremendous amount of pressure with this crash course to quit smoking,” he said.

Even in the last few weeks, as the Orange County jails gradually cut back on the number of cigarette packs that inmates could buy, inmate Hughes said, “I’m already climbing the walls. I’ve picked all my finger nails. I can’t sleep. . . . It’s going to be crazy here.”

But law enforcement officials have heard all the dire warnings before.

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

Last September, the day before Los Angeles County instituted its ban, some deputies blamed the no-smoking tensions for a melee that erupted among 500 inmates who vandalized the South Facility.

In San Diego, a dispute over the cigarette black market was apparently the root of a rumble that broke out a few months ago between rival gangs at the Descanso minimum-security facility, detention director Painter said.

Tobacco Institute spokesman Walker Merryman said he thinks that there have been other incidents, however, that authorities simply aren’t acknowledging. “Any time you take away the very limited rights these people already possess, you’re asking for trouble,” he said.

But authorities say they have done their best to minimize tensions by phasing out cigarette sales, offering classes on how to quit, and selling hard candies to satiate the smoking fix.

“We’ve given the inmates plenty of time and education to let them know this is coming,” Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates said.

But future inmates may have to quit cold turkey.

Tom Uram, Orange County Health Care Agency director, who helped implement the no-smoking policy, said the transition period “is for those guys in there now. The new guy who’s walking in later, he shouldn’t be in the predicament he’s in. I don’t have too much sympathy for that. He’s in a smoke-free environment now.”

Indeed, for weeks, some smokers in Orange County have been hiding away commissary-bought cigarettes in their cells, but many acknowledge that the days of a carefree smoke before morning chow have come to a grudging end.

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