Senate Studies Merger of State, County Prisons : Budget: Sen. Bill Lockyer advocates turning over nonviolent inmates serving short terms to local facilities, which would receive state funds to handle them.

State Senate leader Bill Lockyer on Thursday proposed merging key aspects of the state prison and county jail systems, turning over nonviolent state inmates to county jails, and giving the counties $1 billion annually to handle them.

Lockyer made the proposal as part of an effort to reduce the ever-increasing cost of the state’s $3.4-billion prison system, while giving counties more money to build jails and hire more deputies to handle as many as 25,000 state prisoners.

Calling the California Department of Corrections “our Pentagon,” Lockyer said that without dramatic changes, the state prison budget “will cannibalize all other (state) budgets.”

State spending on higher education is in jeopardy if prison spending grows, as some studies project, to 18% of the state general fund budget by 2003, Lockyer said. Prisons now take 8% of the budget, up from 2% before the prison building boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

“We are not going to be able to build and fund all the prisons that are going to be needed,” Lockyer said.

Lockyer’s proposal could emerge as a major part of this summer’s negotiations over the state budget for next year. Gov. Pete Wilson’s spokesman, Sean Walsh, said the proposal “presents some interesting points.”

In Los Angeles County, Sheriff Sherman Block was skeptical that the proposal would contain enough money to cover costs of the increased number of inmates, but said, “This is certainly worth looking at.” He said several other sheriffs were also intrigued by the idea.

Lockyer noted that counties need state help with their jails. Several counties, including Los Angeles, have been forced to release inmates because jails are too crowded. Counties also have been unable to operate some jails because of lack of money for operations.

Under Lockyer’s plan, counties would receive about $1 billion that now goes into state coffers. The money would come from sales taxes and fines levied by state courts. The state would also ask voters to approve a bond issue of more than $400 million to build more county jails.

Although local sheriffs would continue to have jurisdiction over their jails, the plan seeks to create a system in which state prisons and county jails become more closely aligned, with counties responsible for housing some state inmates, including juveniles, and the state paying some local jail costs.

A fourth of the state’s 126,000 inmates are serving terms of less than a year. Lockyer wants counties to handle those inmates, freeing state cells for hard-core criminals facing years in prison.

The proposal comes as the state Department of Corrections braces for what will probably be a flood of new inmates serving longer sentences imposed by the “three strikes” sentencing law approved by voters in November.

Corrections officials say they will need 15 new prisons by the turn of the century to handle the deluge. Lockyer said that if his plan is adopted, the state would need to build seven or eight prisons by the end of the decade--at $250 million to $300 million each.