A CITY IN CRISIS: HOPE AND PRAYER AMID THE ASHES : Population of Jails Nears Legal Limit : Crowding: Facilities are struggling to keep up as more than 25,000 are being held. Federal maximum is 25,488.

The population of Los Angeles County jails swelled to more than 25,000 on Sunday--a record--as people arrested in last week’s looting and riots continued to pour in from police lockups.

The number of inmates was rapidly approaching the system’s legal capacity of 25,488, set by a federal judge. If the jail population continues to grow, sheriff’s officials will have to ask the courts to temporarily lift the limit, find a place to transfer inmates--or begin releasing them.

“I’ve seen nothing close to this,” said Lt. Richard Didion, watch commander at the inmate reception center of the Men’s Central Jail. “It’s been mind-boggling. But we’re handling it.”

Keeping track of inmates has been a scramble since the rioting began. On Sunday, for instance, officials upgraded the number of people arrested from 6,800 to more than 9,600.

Meanwhile, city and county prosecutors continued their triage-like review of boxes upon boxes of paperwork generated by the arrests. By Sunday evening, they had filed misdemeanor charges against 812 suspects, most for curfew violations, and charged 1,081 others with felonies.

Five courtrooms were being used in downtown Los Angeles to arraign the suspects and courts were opened in Long Beach as well for extraordinary Sunday sessions.

Among those immediately affected by the clogged justice system were families seeking to bail out relatives arrested during the unrest. It was taking 24 hours, four times longer than usual, to get someone released once bond was posted. Sheriff’s deputies had to sift through the crowded jails, then run computer checks to make sure the inmate to be released was not wanted for other crimes.

“It was a really long wait,” Miguel Lopez, 20, of Canoga Park said as he left the Central Jail with his mother, who had posted his bail more than a day earlier.

“All I want to do is go home and take a shower,” said Lopez, who described his arrest as for “a curfew violation in the Valley.”

Ellen Tellez, 23, of Cudahy was feeding her infant son a bottle during her sixth hour of waiting for the release of her husband, Armando. He had been picked up in South Los Angeles on Saturday night while “taking a buddy home that works with him.”

Tellez said she sensed the difficult conditions in the jail when she first called there to find him and “they said they didn’t have anyone by that name.”

Just inside the back entrance to jail, in the “release lobby,” inmates’ friends and relatives took numbers, as if in a bakery, and waited on long benches.

Nevertheless, the two men were among a lucky minority--they had relatives with means to bail them out. Part of the reason for the unprecedented jail crowding was that few of those picked up by police have been able to post bond, a condition exacerbated by the closure of banks and check-cashing businesses.

Jail officials said only several hundred inmates were released from the Central Jail on Sunday. And the professionals called into action at these times, Los Angeles’ bondsmen, confirmed that most of those arrested have been too poor to come up with the cash, or other assets, to meet the $5,000 bail set in most cases.

“People just don’t have the money,” bondsman Richard Burke said.

An increasing inmate population has long been one of the major challenges facing the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In 1985, the County Jail population was about 17,000, but it had risen to 23,797 by May 26, 1988--the record until the last two days.

The 1988 crowding prompted Sheriff Sherman Block to order a controlled release of inmates under terms of a ruling by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray in a lawsuit by the ACLU complaining of jail conditions.

The current crush has come as inmates have been funneled into the county system from Los Angeles police lockups and those maintained by other police departments around the county. In addition, the delay in filing of charges means that hundreds of prisoners are being held while awaiting arraignment in county courts.

Anticipating the influx, sheriff’s officials on Friday and Saturday hurriedly shipped out to state authorities 1,073 inmates who were already sentenced to prison terms but awaiting transfer.

Nevertheless, the County Jail population “has been climbing slowly but steadily. . . . They’re coming in from different locations,” a department spokesman said.

The total passed the 24,000 mark Sunday morning, then topped 25,000 by 4 p.m.

Complicating attempts to handle the unprecedented infusion of arrestees are other logistic demands, such as providing inmates for court appearances.

As more charges were filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the city attorney, sheriff’s deputies delivered 599 inmates to various courts for arraignment Sunday. They were preparing to have another 2,000 ready for court appearances today.

“Frankly, the system’s not set up to do this many,” said Norm Shapiro, head of the filing in the county prosecutor’s office.

Through Sunday night, his team of deputy district attorneys had reviewed the cases of 1,177 people arrested for potential felony violations and filed charges on 1,081 of them, most for burglary or possession of stolen goods.

As of yet, “nothing has been brought to us in the nature of a homicide,” Shapiro said.

Another 30 cases had been forwarded to the city attorney for consideration of misdemeanor charges and 66 were “rejected” for prosecution because of lack of evidence, Shapiro said.

At the same time, city prosecutors have been receiving hundreds of files directly from police for their review.

Coordinating parts of the system is no easy matter, and there have been inevitable foul-ups.

Sunday morning, a group of suspects being held in the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters was supposed to be delivered for arraignment at the Criminal Courts Building just a few blocks away. But buses took the group instead to the reception center at Central Jail--where deputies dutifully began processing the suspects into the county system.

Later, when a supervising prosecutor stopped by the arraignment court to see how the process was working, the first defendant called was a Carlos Ayala, but he wasn’t there. A Ruben Ayala had been delivered instead.

“They’re struggling to link the paperwork to the bodies,” Shapiro noted.