New Prison Opens Gates to 1st Inmates : Lancaster: Six-year effort ends quietly with arrival of 22 medium-security occupants at the state’s 24th penitentiary.

The first state prison built in Los Angeles County, a $207-million complex in west Lancaster, opened its razor wire-topped gates Monday to receive its first group of inmates, quietly climaxing six years of political and legal quarreling over the site.

A bus carrying 22 minimum-security inmates pulled into the Lancaster prison’s yard at 9:10 a.m., the first of up to 4,000 expected to arrive at the 252-acre facility within the coming months. The 1.2-million-square-foot Lancaster prison is the 24th in the state’s system.

“We’re really excited about getting this thing started. It’s been a long time in coming,” said Warden Otis Thurman, the former warden at the state’s Chino prison who was named to run the Lancaster site. Thurman said Lancaster expects six busloads of inmates just this week.

The prison is designed to hold 2,200 inmates, but officials said that like most of the overcrowded state prison system, it soon will be at nearly twice its capacity. The prison was completed in mid-1992, but its original October opening date was delayed because of the state’s budget problems.

The prison’s history dates to 1982 when the Legislature directed that a prison be built somewhere in Los Angeles County. That stemmed from resentment that the county had long accounted for about 40% of the state’s prison population (now about 40,000 of 100,000) but had no state prison.

But the Lancaster site did not emerge until 1987 when the Legislature approved a “pain-for-pain compromise” to put one prison in the Republican high desert and another in the Democratic East Los Angeles area. Then Gov. Pete Wilson last September signed a bill abandoning the latter site.

Community leaders in the Antelope Valley originally strongly opposed the Lancaster site. The city of Lancaster and the county sued to block the prison, but lost when the state Supreme Court in September, 1991, refused to hear their challenge on environmental grounds.

Meanwhile, the Antelope Valley community, economically battered by the recession and defense spending cutbacks, began to look at the prison in a more positive light as a source of about 800 new jobs and a projected economic impact of $50 million a year.

Thurman has promised that at least 300 of those 800 jobs, or about 37%, will go to local residents. He admitted Monday that the institution is lagging on that pledge, with locals accounting for only 96 of 495 people hired so far--about 19%. But Thurman said he still expects to fulfill his pledge.

The prison site, ringed by razor-wire-topped fences and a dozen guard towers, is in a mostly undeveloped area next to the county’s High Desert Hospital and Mira Loma jail. The prison grounds are north of Avenue J between 50th and 60th streets west, about four miles west of downtown.

The prison is divided into five facilities: a dormitory for the 200 minimum security inmates who will help run the facility, two medium security complexes totaling 1,000 cells, and two maximum security complexes with another 1,000 cells. Each cell contains two bunks.

The prison will have inmate work areas, including a laundry, a factory to produce cleaning supplies and a print shop.

And Thurman said the Lancaster prison will have a wider range of adult education and vocational programs than many other state prison facilities.

Despite the location, Thurman said people convicted of felonies in Los Angeles County will not necessarily be sent to the Lancaster prison, which has the formal name of California State Prison--Los Angeles County. A formal dedication ceremony with dignitaries will be held in several months.