New City Jail May House Inmates Up to 45 Days : Justice: S.D. Council weighs plan to use Otay Mesa facility for sentenced prisoners.

The San Diego City Council will consider a proposal Monday to keep prisoners in the new city jail for up to 45 days, but concern over medical expenses means inmates likely to get sick may be turned over to the county or not jailed at all.

The 200-bed jail at Otay Mesa, built for those convicted of misdemeanors, has been open as a pre-arraignment facility since May 10 under a contract with the Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corp.

While city officials had expected the jail to fill up quickly, it has housed a nightly average of only 100 inmates, said Sgt. George Dowden of the San Diego Police Department’s Special Projects Division.

For years, the county jail system has been so overburdened, misdemeanants are rarely booked. Even after the jail opened in May, many officers continued to cite and release offenders, Dowden said.

Glitches in the jail’s video arraignment process also had to be worked out, adding to the new jail’s slow start.

“It’s something that’s going to build,” Dowden said, “once the officers get used to it, and the system gets used to it. We have room for more people there.”

The city signed a 10-year contract with Wackenhut at a cost of $4.2 million a year, City Manager Jack McGrory said. Under the contract, prisoners stay only until they are arraigned by video--a maximum of five days.

That contract would have to be reworked if the council chooses to use the jail for sentenced prisoners.

Under the proposal, inmates sentenced to serve 45 days or less--mostly misdemeanor warrant offenders and those sentenced for battery or disturbing the peace--could be booked into the city jail, Dowden said.

Drunk drivers who have had their probation revoked also could be sentenced to serve time there, under the encouragement of Presiding Municipal Judge H. Ronald Domnitz. A total of 64 beds would be set aside for sentenced prisoners.

“I was looking for any sort of jail space, and since this seemed to be available, that’s why I suggested it,” Domnitz said. “If I sentence people on DUIs, I sentence them to 10 or 15 days, or 20 days. They go to the County Jail, they’re put immediately on work release, and they never see the inside of the jail. I was looking for some facility, so there can be some real punishment, rather than doing some volunteer work at the VA Hospital.”

The 64 additional beds won’t solve the problems of a strapped criminal justice system with almost no room for misdemeanant offenders, Domnitz said, but “since we have no jail space for short-termers, this would be 64 that we didn’t have before.”

If the contract with the private Wackenhut is to be renegotiated, however, liability for inmates’ medical bills will be a key issue.

The longer an inmate stays in jail, the greater the likelihood of some type of medical expense, McGrory said.

“We’re looking at the feasibility of outside insurance,” he said. “We’ll have Wackenhut do medical screening before they place (inmates) in the facility. There’s no point in taking a prisoner that will have medical problems. They would go to the county or they just wouldn’t go to jail. We just want healthy prisoners.”

While a police legal adviser in the city attorney’s office said there have been no inmate health claims against the city yet, and Wackenhut has accepted some liability under the current contract, the county has incurred tremendous expenses, said Dan Greenblat, chief special assistant to the sheriff.

“Pose the hypothetical. What if you end up with an inmate who develops a serious debilitating disease?” Greenblat said. “We had an inmate with lung fibrosis whose medical costs exceeded $100,000. We have had a heart by-pass. The county pays for it.”

The issue of liability currently prohibits anyone under the influence of alcohol and drugs from being booked into a city facility, McGrory said. Those inmates are booked into County Jail.

Dowden said more than 2,000 misdemeanants have been arrested and booked into the city jail since May 10, and up to 60 each day have been arraigned by video. But Friday only 79 of the facility’s 200 beds were full.

The arraignment process has posed some glitches, but the main reason for the slow start is that city police officers have not been adequately trained in booking procedures, Dowden said.

“There are a lot of officers who have never booked a misdemeanant before. They are used to writing citations and releasing people, which takes a matter of minutes,” Dowden said. “To book someone takes a little bit longer.” At first the process was taking officers an average of an hour and 40 minutes, he said, but that average is now down to 20 minutes.

But the half-empty facility hasn’t impacted city coffers, Dowden said. “Our object is not to fill beds. Our object is to arrest and book misdemeanants. We don’t pay by person. We pay by the jail,” he said.

Dowden said the goal of the current proposal is to house misdemeanants only until January, when the county’s 1,500-bed East Mesa jail is slated to open.

But whether the East Mesa jail will have room for those convicted of misdemeanors when it opens remains to be seen, Greenblat said.

“That’s why we need to have this flexibility,” McGrory said.

Councilman John Hartley said the city facility should be used to meet the city’s needs.

“I think we have taken on the responsibility, and we have to ensure that the jail will function. If that is a requirement, I think we will have to meet it,” he said of the liability issue.

“None of the basic responsibility is ours. It is really the county and the state,” Hartley said. “But people want public safety, and people expect us to create the leadership to see that problems are solved. In this case we needed a jail. I’m 100% behind it. If there was a well-functioning, open county jail, I would probably be singing another tune.”