Apartments-for-Prisoners Plan Sparks Fear : Corrections: County’s proposal to turn two Costa Mesa residential complexes into a facility for low-risk offenders on work furlough has sparked intense debate. Vote is expected Tuesday.

Hidden in the shadows of Fullerton Municipal Airport, the two faded brown apartment buildings don’t look much like a jail. There are no armed guards, no bars, not even a gate to enclose their 80 inmates.

A nearby “For Rent” banner--advertising rooms for $450 a month--has even lured a few unwary passers-by into its drab confines. But this is not a place people want to end up. Appearances aside, it is a minimum-security work furlough facility, and it has now become a flash point in a debate over the county’s need for more jail beds for its rising population of criminals.

County officials thought they had found a piece of the jail puzzle: expand the Community Furlough Program by setting up a 50-bed facility in Costa Mesa, modeled after the one in Buena Park.

Set up in 1987, the Buena Park site was the first facility of its kind in the state for incarcerating low-risk offenders who then pay a weekly rate for their imprisonment. Buoyed by its success, Orange County officials set up a similar, smaller facility in Anaheim two years later and have touted the Buena Park site to other Southland counties pursuing the concept.

But some Costa Mesa leaders and residents, upset and fearful about the idea of bringing the furlough program to their city, see a showdown looming at the county’s Hall of Administration this week.

City concern over a minimum-security jail in its midst forced a two-week delay, but on Tuesday, the Orange County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to decide whether to locate the center in a lower-income neighborhood on the west side of town. The board is considered likely to approve the measure.

The county, with the aid of a nonprofit contractor, hopes to turn two Costa Mesa apartment buildings into a corrections center for drunk drivers, welfare cheats, deadbeat dads and other sentenced offenders whom the probation department deems a low risk to the community. Each day after work, the inmates would be required to return to the facility, where staff members would conduct regular head counts, as well as drug and alcohol tests, officials say.

Staff members in Buena Park and Anaheim warn that any inmate testing positive for alcohol--or “blowing numbers,” as staff members who read Breathalyzer test devices call it--will likely be put on the first bus back to one of the main county jails--the kind with bars.

The proposed Costa Mesa center is one key step in a plan endorsed by county supervisors last spring to ease jail overcrowding by expanding both furlough and electronic surveillance programs. Just last month, a League of California Cities study deemed Orange County’s jail situation a crisis, predicting a shortage of nearly 5,300 jail beds within 13 years.

But the furlough issue has already strained relations between the county and the city of Costa Mesa in recent weeks, as city leaders complain they were not even told about the local project until it was practically a done deal.

“We were stonewalled,” said Costa Mesa Mayor Sandra L. Genis. “The county people were exceedingly reluctant to release any information on this. They’ve been trying to keep it under their hat. . . . You start to wonder, what is it that they’re not telling us? What don’t they want us to know?”

Genis and other city leaders suggest that the furlough center could make Costa Mesa a “dumping ground” for halfway houses and other facilities catering to people on the rebound. Residents say it could damage a neighborhood already infiltrated by gangs and drugs. Landlords fear it could hurt property values and cause tenants to flee the area.

“We need added negative influences in the city like we need a hole in the head,” said Phil Morello, one of a handful of Costa Mesa residents who complained about the project at last week’s City Council meeting.

“It has been a trend in this city to attract organizations like this,” he said. “I believe a 50-bed facility will be another bad influence.”

More than 60 people have already written or called Costa Mesa City Hall to voice concern over the project. City Manager Allan L. Roeder said he expects more opposition as word spreads about the proposal.

But Rhonda Holly doesn’t see what all the fuss is about.

Busted for possession of amphetamines and marijuana in Orange last year, Holly is serving a nine-month sentence at the Buena Park furlough center, which is in the 8600 block of Commonwealth Avenue, just west of the Fullerton city limits. When she’s not working as a waitress at a nearby restaurant, she spends most of her time in a small, sparsely furnished room that she shares with another woman.

“It’s not like you’re living across the street from the jail. You look at the place and you think it’s an apartment,” Holly, 27, said last week as she got ready for work. “Besides, it’s not going to do me any any good to sit in jail behind bars for nine months.”

The 80-bed Buena Park facility has an anonymous look to it--intentionally. It fades seamlessly into a block of low-rent apartments next door, and no signs mark its presence.

“We don’t want to draw attention,” said Beth Hubbs, who manages the facility for Orange County Youth and Family Services Inc., a nonprofit Garden Garden group contracted to run the program for the county. The agency is being considered to manage the proposed Costa Mesa site as well.

A battered old pool table sits in the parking lot outside the Buena Park buildings. Inmates also can mingle in front of a television in the recreation room, or at benches in front of their two-person rooms. Curfew is 10 p.m. nightly (11 p.m. on weekends), and inmates are taken in small, monitored groups to the grocery store. Each unit has its own kitchen, where inmates cook for themselves.

Center inmates have included salesmen and construction workers, waitresses and chefs, even lawyers and a principal. They leave the facility each day by bus or car for their regular jobs, returning to custody at night. One common theme among the inmates is that the nature of their crimes justifies the relative freedom that they enjoy, even while in jail.

“I guess I am a criminal,” said a 38-year-old former grocery manager, convicted three times for drunk driving. “But I’m not a common criminal. I’ve never done anything to break the law except drink and drive.”

Although staff members make regular rounds, there is little to stop an inmate from escaping. But officials say few ever do--only about six annually out some 700 people who serve their sentences in Buena Park each year.

“As alternatives go, this is a very good place to be,” Hubbs said.

Debbie Abrecht, associate executive director at the furlough operating agency, explains why: “These aren’t desperate people looking for the chance to escape. They just want to do their time and go back to their families.”

Indeed, for inmates housed in the county’s traditional jails, it’s considered a privilege to be allowed to transfer into either of the county’s furlough programs--the Buena Park facility, or the second, 38-bed center in the 200 block of West Palais Road in Anaheim, which was established in 1989.

Most never come back. Michael Schumacher, the county’s chief probation officer, said more than 95% of furloughed inmates serve their sentences without committing any infractions--such as using drugs or alcohol while in custody. About the same percentage stay out of trouble with the law for three years afterward.

Some furloughed inmates interviewed last week in Buena Park say they resent the fees charged them--up to $54 a night, depending on their income. The fees offset about 40% of the $1.275 million a year that the county pays the agency to run the Buena Park and Anaheim facilities.

“It’s a rip-off,” grumbled John, 38, a Newport Beach data processor who says he is paying $400 a week to stay in Buena Park on a third-time drunk driving offense. He declined to give his last name.

“The whole thing will wind up costing me $12,000. . . . And I’m paying for the other people” who don’t earn as much and aren’t charged as much in fees, he complained.

Yet John and other inmates consider themselves lucky. The program, they say, allows them to keep their jobs, their family lives, and--perhaps most critically--some semblance of their dignity.

Dignity is hard to come by inside the county’s walled jails.

“Your self-esteem is utterly crushed--you’re nothing, you’re a pile of (garbage),” said Holly, the waitress who served 1 1/2 months in the county women’s jail before moving into the furlough program. “You’re an animal.”

As for community security concerns, some Buena Park officials praise the program and downplay security concerns such as those expressed by wary Costa Mesa residents.

Buena Park Police Sgt. Terry Branum says bluntly that he’d just as soon the furlough program take over the entire complex of neighboring apartments, to weed out drug pushers and troublemakers rooted there.

“That’s probably the quietest of the five or six buildings,” Branum said of the center. “It’s been real peaceful. They’re model citizens.”

The furlough center’s neighbors give similar glowing reports. Chuck Andrews, 35, who lives in the building next to the facility and lives on Social Security checks because of a work accident, says the tough economic climate in the area may explain the neighborly attitude.

“This is the bottom of the barrel,” Andrews said as he pointed to the dilapidated apartments around him. “When you reach the bottom, you’re willing to stick a hand out and give other people a chance. They’re giving it a shot--that’s what matters.”

Correspondent Lynda Natali contributed to this report.

Furlough Program Offenses

Drunk drivers make up more than half of Orange County’s low-risk offenders. They are allowed to serve their sentences in furlough programs in Anaheim and Buena Park. A look at the percentage breakdown for offenses among the 110 people in the program, taken from a recent day: Drunk driving, criminal driving: 57% Low-risk narcotics (i.e., drug possession): 24% Petty theft, shoplifting, low-risk property crimes: 13% Other: 6% Source: Orange County Probation Department