County Must Reveal Types of Prisoners Housed at Lacy Jail

A Superior Court judge Monday ordered the county to reveal whether maximum-security inmates have been housed at the Theo Lacy Jail in the city of Orange, in violation of previous agreements with the city.

Earlier this year, Orange had sued the Board of Supervisors after the county unveiled a plan to double the size of the 1,000-bed, medium-security facility, in large part because of overcrowding throughout the jail system.

The city contends that the county cannot be trusted in the future to expand Theo Lacy--which is in the midst of a shopping center, children’s home and hospital--since it has already violated a previous agreement to protect people around the facility by using it only for the least violent prisoners.

In 1990, the county agreed to cap expansion of Theo Lacy and promised that no maximum-security inmates would be housed there. But attorneys for the city assert that that agreement has been violated, and to verify that assertion they asked the court to order the county to turn over to city officials jail policy procedures.

Known formally as the Sheriff’s Inmate Classification and Screening Criteria, the information is used to determine whether inmates are sent to minimum-, medium- or maximum-security facilities.

“Our argument in this case is that the Sheriff’s Department has changed three different times the classification system . . . allowing a more serious kind of offender to be housed at the Theo Lacy facility than was allowed under” the 1990 settlement agreement, said Geoffrey K. Willis, who represents the city.

“The reason the Theo Lacy facility has always been . . . a low-risk facility is because of its urban proximity,” Willis said. “It’s right in the heart of a commercial, residential area. . . . We need to know . . . whether or not the sheriff has in fact allowed maximum-security prisoners to be housed there. The only way for us to know that is to know how their classification system works.”

The county’s attorney denied that maximum-security inmates are housed at Theo Lacy or that the criteria had been changed, and he argued that there was good reason for the county to keep the screening information confidential.

Deputy County Counsel David R. Chaffee said the sheriff and others fear that if the screening criteria became public, prison gang members or other inmates would be able to manipulate the system and get into lower security custody. This could lead to contract killings and jailbreaks, he said.

Norman Dowds, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who is hearing the case in Santa Ana, agreed with the city on disclosure of the documents but took into account the county’s concern about keeping the information confidential.

Dowds ordered that the information be shown only to the city’s attorneys, the city manager and one other person, all of whom would be permitted to read the documents but not to copy them or disclose their contents. A separate order from the judge will be required for members of the City Council to examine the documents, Dowds said.

Chaffee said that maximum-security inmates had never been housed at Theo Lacy but that when the central jail reached overcrowding levels prohibited by a federal court order, some inmates at the upper range of the medium-security classification had been transferred to Theo Lacy. Also, inmates with Immigration and Naturalization Service holds were also sent to the facility, Chaffee said.

The only other exception, Chaffee said, came during last summer’s drywall installers’ strike, “when we had more people than we knew what to do with” and some individuals accused of serious crimes like kidnaping were sent to the Orange facility.