Jail Technology Due for Upgrade

In Orange County’s largest jail, communication technology has been a prisoner for longer than anyone can remember. Now, it’s about to win a reprieve.

For the last few years, the 30-year-old communication system at Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana has operated as a quasi-museum, an unwanted tribute to the technology of the 1960s when much of it was installed.

The system frequently breaks down, to the concern of officials. In the control room, gray sheet-metal boxes hide a jumble of high-voltage wires linking the room to more than a dozen security doors.

The wires have been changed so often that the plans--the room’s equivalent of a manual--are hopelessly out of date. No one can remember which wire links which door. Engineers searching for the source of a wiring problem must use their fingers to trace lines back from doors to the control panel. That can bring its own dangers.

“I remember being in here and getting [electrically] shocked,” sheriff’s engineer Kirk Wilkerson said as he held up a knot of wires.

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The county has been talking about replacing the antiquated system for years, but the work has been delayed, most recently because of the Orange County bankruptcy.

But later this year, the 30-year-old communication network will be replaced by a state-of-the-art $500,000 system.

It will be a major advancement on what deputies now use. Some of the amplifiers date back to the mid-1950s and are easy to spot.

They are the ones powered by vacuum tubes glowing red-hot, resembling technology that set designers of “Lost in Space” might have rejected as outdated.

Deputies still use one of the jail’s original 1968 intercoms to communicate with other guards.

“There are frequent breakdowns, which cause a severe strain on staff,” Wilkerson said. “Some parts are really archaic.”

The communications room--the building’s nerve center--serves some of the most important functions in the jail. It is from there that deputies monitor people entering and leaving the main building.

The room also controls the opening and closing of iron gates that separate inmates from jail administrators.

And if guards are attacked, they must rely on the communications room for fast help.

More pressing needs and the county’s dire financial fortunes in the early 1990s delayed plans to overhaul the communication system.

As parts became obsolete and impossible to replace, sheriff’s engineers had to become creative during repairs.

“When we were going through the bankruptcy, we were scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep it running,” Wilkerson said. “We were almost using baling wire and bubble gum.”

Soon, touch-screen computers will be installed. A new warning system will alert staff of potential malfunctions.

And deputies’ hands will no longer have to scramble from switch to screen and back to switch again--like some frenzied percussionist--just to open a door.