Countywide : Sheriff’s Dept. Opposes State Prison Merger

Orange County Assistant Sheriff Jerry Krans spoke out this week against a state senator’s proposal to send some of the state’s nonviolent prisoners to county jails.

The five county jails do not have enough room to house their own inmates, Krans said Tuesday.

“The state wants to pass the burden on to the county, but the county has been overcrowded for years,” he said. “There’s no room at the inn. We have caps on our populations, and if the state starts sending us more, if they start pushing them down on us, we’ll have to release more into the community.”

Krans’ remarks were in response to a proposed merger between the state prison and county jail systems, suggested by state Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) as part of an effort to reduce the ever-increasing cost of the state’s $3.4-billion prison system. Under the proposal, counties would receive a total of $1 billion to handle the influx of about 25,000 state prisoners.

Krans said that more than 300,000 inmates have been released early in the last decade because of a federal court order designed to alleviate overcrowded conditions in the county’s jail system.

In announcing his proposal, Lockyer said that the state’s spending on higher education is in jeopardy if the prison system grows.

But Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates said that up to 200 inmates are being released early each month to make way for new inmates.

“We need more jails,” he said.

The end result is that some sentences are being reduced by as much as 20% to 30%, which “upsets the courts,” Gates said.

He said that other counties whose jails have empty beds might benefit from Lockyer’s plan, but not Orange County.

By court order, the county must release an inmate if the jail system cannot find a bed for him or her within 24 hours.

“It’s a touchy issue,” Gates said.