Finding a Jail Site

It’s been so long since a federal judge told Orange County it needed to find new jail space that a child born then could be graduating from college now.

And how much progress has the county made? Actually, it has fallen further behind.

Since the 1978 ruling, some beds have been added to existing jails, the Orange jail has been expanded and a new facility has been built in Santa Ana. But all have been Band-Aids on a wound growing more serious. In the past decade, nearly half a million inmates have been released before their jail terms were up for lack of space behind bars.

Either the county finally acts and builds a jail or it admits that for all the tough talk on crime, the law-and-order rhetoric, it’s unwilling to match the money to the mouth.

Sheriff Mike Carona took office this year with a pledge to get a new jail built. He promised not to seek reelection if he doesn’t solve the jail overcrowding problem. That’s an admirable promise, though tough to keep.

Carona’s predecessor, Brad Gates, was a savvy politician, but he couldn’t get the Board of Supervisors to do much more than pick a site where it wanted a new facility built. Its enthusiasm was scant; voters were hostile.

It was 1987 when the supervisors picked a site in Gypsum and Coal canyons, south of the Riverside Freeway and east of Anaheim Hills, for a new jail. It took another four years before the board passed the buck to the voters, who rejected the site.

That sort of dithering should not be repeated.

Carona and local officials have begun searching for a site for a jail. The county estimates it needs about 2,000 more beds now, and more than 5,000 new beds within 10 years.

A decade ago, supervisors picked a so-called remote site, the one near Anaheim Hills. But the stunning pace of development in Orange County has resulted in no buildable site that is also remote. Hillsides don’t make good sites for jails. Bulldozing them to create flat ground is expensive and usually environmentally unjustifiable.

The new sheriff has managed to scale back the estimates of how many jail beds are needed. At one point, the James A. Musick Branch Jail near Irvine was approved to hold as many as 7,500 inmates, including maximum-security prisoners, rather than the 1,100 minimum-security inmates housed there now. Carona has since lowered his estimate of the number of new jail beds needed to about 5,000.

The sheriff also is faced with a possible initiative that would make it extremely difficult to build jails within half a mile of homes.

The true target of the initiative is an El Toro airport, but a committee named by Carona to find a jail site will now have a tougher task. The timing is right to use that committee’s work to move toward a resolution of this question.

One way to reduce jail beds eventually is to get convicts whose main problem is drugs into treatment programs in locked, secure facilities operated by sheriff’s deputies and professionals treating inmates for their addictions. It takes more beds initially but will pay off when men and women stop committing crimes to feed their addictions and stop returning to jail again and again. Treatment programs cost money, but the county should press for state and federal funds to help.

Jails are one of the costs of government. Last year the county released thousands of inmates before their terms were up to make room for those accused of more violent crimes. Most freed early were serving sentences of one year or less and were not as much a threat to the community as those sent to state prisons, which hold inmates whose sentences are a year or more. But sentences imposed by judges should be meaningful, not cut short for lack of space.

Carona, city officials and the supervisors should set a deadline of the end of the year to pick a site. Then early next year they should sell bonds or come up with another financing mechanism. Environmental studies can be lengthy; that’s to be expected. But today’s supervisors should not take a leaf from their predecessors’ book and turn their backs on the problem after they pick a site.