Section of the Pitchess Jail Is Closed : Corrections: Honor rancho’s minimum-security facility is shut as a budget-cutting measure. All but 200 inmates are released.

The Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho’s minimum-security facility, which has held prisoners since 1934, is now empty, the result of cost-cutting measures at the county Sheriff’s Department.

The minimum-security facility at Pitchess, as well as the Biscailuz Center in East Los Angeles, was quietly closed on Friday, it was disclosed by county and Sheriff’s Department officials Monday.

A combined total of about 2,300 inmates who were in the Pitchess jail and Biscailuz Center have either been given early release or transferred to other facilities.

Except for 200 inmates transferred to other sections of Pitchess, all of the minimum-security prisoners there have been released.

Some 9,500 medium- and maximum-security inmates remain at Pitchess.

At the Pitchess jail, the mood on Monday was somber--there were no prisoners and only a few guards.

On Monday afternoon, William Diehl, 55, a sheriff’s correctional officer for 29 years, was putting up a sign saying that the inmate services center, where prisoners bought supplies, had been moved.

“It’s probably sad to most of us,” said Diehl, who has worked at the facility since 1978. “It’s the end of an era.”

Cmdr. Robert Spierer, who oversees all five Pitchess facilities, said that because the minimum-security facility had successfully dodged the budget bullet and escaped being closed so many times in the past, many employees assumed it was safe.

“This really hit us, at least at my level, by surprise,” Spierer said.

Most deputies working the facility will be reassigned to other jails or vacant positions in the Sheriff’s Department, Spierer said. No layoffs have been announced.

One group that has shed no tears over the closing of the facility is its former prisoners, guards said.

“The whole topic of their conversation was who was getting released,” said Luis Najera, captain of the jail’s South facility.

The Sheriff’s Department had been releasing hundreds of inmates since March 2, the day Sheriff Sherman Block announced he would close the facility and Biscailuz Center to make up for a $7.3-million cut in his department’s budget.

Although the releases provoked outrage on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Block stood firm.

The Sheriff’s Department has said that most of the prisoners given early releases had been convicted of misdemeanors or were scheduled to be let go anyway within 72 hours.

Also, many of those let out of jail were assigned to work-release programs where they will actually serve more time than if they had remained in jail. Work programs must be completed and do not allow for early release or parole.

Over the years, Block has threatened several times to close down jails in response to budget cuts. Two years ago, the Mira Loma Jail in the Antelope Valley was shut down. It remains closed.

Sheriff’s officials said they believe the department will not suffer further significant cuts, at least until the next round of county cutbacks.

“We feel we’ve given at the blood bank already,” said Fred Ramirez, director of the Sheriff Department’s Office of Administrative Services.

The facility was built as a place where inmates convicted of public drunkenness or other minor crimes would serve short sentences. The inmates’ work duties included milking cows and other agricultural chores, providing much of the food to the county’s jails.

“This was a 300-man drunk farm,” Sheriff’s Lt. Errol Van Horn said. “This is where the public drunks were brought, and they worked in vegetable and fruit gardens.”

Farming operations were phased out in the 1980s as it became cheaper to buy food wholesale than to grow it, Van Horn said.

“We compensated for that by increasing our educational programming,” he said.

Finding workers to fulfill duties provided by inmates will be difficult, Spierer said. He said they landscaped and cleaned the jail’s five facilities. They worked in crews in open areas with minimum supervision because they were considered low escape risks.

“We needed to release the lowest-security inmates (who) were not a threat to the community, so we lost most of our workers,” Spierer said.

A handful of deputies will remain at the facility, Spierer said. He said they will flush toilets, run water faucets and perform other duties to keep the facility operational in case it reopens.

“If we don’t maintain the faucets, flush the toilets and check the sinks, we will have horrendous plumbing problems when we turn it back on again,” he said.

On Monday, the facility’s faded yellow barracks had already been stripped. Mattresses, televisions and game tables had already been sent to other jail facilities throughout the county.

Najera glanced inside the empty chapel.

“How many guys have been in here before,” he asked, “praying for an early release?”