Sheriff to Use Camp to House Excess Inmates : Jails: The Descanso honor facility will be used in order to meet a court directive to trim prisoner populations at other locations. The transfer of power upsets the probation department.

Racing to meet a June 30 deadline to relieve jail crowding, San Diego County Sheriff Jim Roache was granted permission Monday to take temporary control of the Descanso honor camp, essentially allowing him to meet a court-ordered cap on inmate population for the first time.

With approval from the county’s chief administrative officer, Roache was given oversight of the honor camp--reserved for low-risk inmates and supervised by probation officials--and will fill 240 empty beds with medium-security inmates.

Roache also plans to double-bunk the East Mesa medium-security jail, which will give him 216 extra beds.

Taken together, the 456 new beds will bring the Sheriff’s Department within 44 of a court-ordered cap set by Superior Court Judge James A. Malkus that must be met in eight days, sheriff’s officials said. Another hearing on the matter is scheduled for mid-July.

Because jail populations can fluctuate by hundreds of inmates each day, the court-imposed limit can be easily met, officials said.

“This action gives us maximum flexibility in managing our inmate overcrowding problem,” sheriff’s spokesman Dan Greenblat said. “We get over 200 beds in one administrative stroke. Compounded with the beds we’ll get at East Mesa, we’ll have over 400 beds, which will bring us in compliance.”

Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said the transfer will stay in place until 90 days after a new 1,500-bed jail is opened, probably sometime in the fall. After that, he said, Descanso will revert back to an honor camp.

Because the transfer of the facility is temporary, the County Board of Supervisors was not required to vote on it.

Janssen’s decision angered probation officials, who had supervised the honor camp since September. Gerard A. Williams, the county’s acting chief probation officer, has asserted to Roache and Janssen in memos that empty beds have been available for several months.

“Your department has consistently failed to avail itself of the means to fill the minimum-security beds with appropriate and available inmates within your jails,” Williams wrote to Roache two weeks ago.

On June 2, the day of the last court hearing before Malkus, he wrote, the probation department “had 284 empty beds while you had inmates sleeping on the floor.”

Sheriff’s officials have countered that they don’t have enough low-risk inmates to keep the honor camp full and that they need trusties of their own to help run their jails. With Monday’s decision, Janssen said, the Sheriff’s Department will be able to transfer medium-security inmates to Descanso.

The Sheriff’s Department operated Descanso from 1981 to last September, and security for the higher-risk inmates is more than adequate, Janssen said. Probation officials will continue to work at the camp but the Sheriff’s Department will supervise.

On a personal level, Williams wrote that he was dismayed that Roache’s employees had been calling the probation department to ask about the transfer weeks before a decision was made.

“When you were elected,” Williams told Roache, “there was a concerted effort, I thought, to bring a ‘new spirit of cooperation’ between the two departments. Now with the most recent occurrences, it certainly appears that they were only words. How unfortunate for everyone!”

Hoping to ease the blow wrought by the power struggle, Roache vowed in a prepared statement to “continue working creatively and cooperatively with the Probation Department to meet this challenge. We have common goals in providing a cost effective detention system which maximizes public safety as well.”

The sheriff said he hopes to “absorb numerous probation staff” members in the transition.

Because the honor camps hold sentenced prisoners and the county jails hold, for the most part, unsentenced inmates, Roache has been forced to find space in a facility his staff can manage, Greenblat said.

“The excess capacity is the unsentenced prisoners,” Greenblat said. “It has been our position that we can do a better job because probation is limited to a (low-risk) type of prisoner.”

But probation officials don’t see it that way. They believe it is more costly for the sheriff to operate honor camps and that Roache and others do not force sentenced prisoners to join work crews, which provide the county millions of dollars in free labor.

“Once again, the Sheriff’s Department is suggesting that the only way to solve the jail overcrowding crisis is to transfer control,” Williams wrote in a June 10 letter to Janssen. “Responding to these continual attempts to increase the Sheriff’s Department is becoming increasingly tiresome.”