Countywide : Proposal to Expand Classes for Inmates

Orange County Sheriff’s Department officials are proposing an $111,532 expansion of inmate education programs in the county’s four jails.

The proposal, which will come before the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, would add Spanish-language substance abuse classes and some basic adult education courses to the voluntary classes already available in the jails.

Existing class offerings, such as job development and English as a second language, would also be expanded by the plan to increase jailhouse instructor staffing from 20 to 28 teachers.

“We have a critical need for jail space, as everyone knows, and the goal here is to attack the problem from both sides,” Assistant Sheriff Jerry Krans said. “If we can bridge problems such as illiteracy and lack of job skills, maybe we can prevent some of these people from making a return trip.

“Our job is to rehabilitate and, in some instances, habilitate these people,” Krans said.

The program’s first-year cost would be completely covered by profits made at jail commissaries, Krans said. The program would become eligible in its second year for state funding.

“We would use our funds as seed money to help start the program up, then the state funds would kick in from there,” he said.

Rancho Santiago Community College instructors have been teaching in the four jails for several years, a program that is also subsidized by commissary profits.

But state funding caps on institutional teaching hours by any single college have limited the number and sizes of classes, corrections programming supervisor Mercedes Julian said.

The new package of courses would be taught by Orange County Department of Education instructors, allowing officials to tap into separate funding sources, Julian said.

The expansion would allow jail officials to add classes to complement the current offerings that allow inmates to work toward a high school equivalency degree. It would also decrease the size of some classes, creating more individual attention, Julian said.

An adult basic education class for prisoners with reading levels below eighth grade and a “refresher” class for high school degree holders would be available.

The County Jail’s vocational program, which already includes courses on landscaping, welding, sewing, furniture repair and other skills, would also be expanded. A computer-assisted drafting class would be added, possibly paving the way for other computer-oriented courses in the future, Julian said.

Jail officials say there is a consistent waiting list for many of the classes, in particular life skills, family skills and substance abuse. Krans said the need for the literacy classes is made clear by results from a 1993 survey that showed 80% of inmates had reading and writing difficulties.

County reports prepared last July show that since 1990, the education program has annually handled “well over 1,000” inmates, a total matched by the vocational program.

The classes from the two programs annually total about 230,000 student hours.