Sheriff Still Considering Private Desert Site to House Inmates

Sheriff Mike Carona still is considering a plan to send hundreds of inmates to a $100-million private lockup in the Mojave Desert to ease overcrowding at the Orange County Jail, officials said Monday, though it was unclear despite three months of study whether state law would allow such a move.

More than 10,000 new jail beds will be needed by 2006 in the county system, where many prisoners wait as long as three or four years before they go to trial, Assistant Sheriff John “Rocky” Hewitt said.

One solution would be to rent space at a privately run maximum-security facility recently built in California City, a site two hours from Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert.

Use of the facility, which now stands empty, would cost $55 a day for each inmate and would be done in an agreement with Los Angeles and Kern counties’ sheriff’s departments. Prisoners would remain the responsibility of the respective counties’ departments.

“We are not going to put our prisoners in a jail being watched by anyone else than officers or sheriff’s deputies,” Hewitt said. “It is simply not legal.”

Under state law, however, people must remain in the county in which they were arrested pending trial, and the sheriff of that county cannot turn that responsibility over to a private entity. That does not apply to inmates who have been sentenced and are waiting to be transported to state prison, Carona said.

Questions also remain as to “whether or not the board of supervisors from one county can partner with the board of supervisors from another county in a contractual relationship,” Carona said, and funding issues would have to be resolved.

Carona said in May that his staff was considering use of the California City facility if the legal issues could be resolved.

Such a plan would require extensive coordination among counties, Hewitt said Monday. “There’s a lot of road to travel,” he said. “There are liability issues and costs. This is just one of many alternatives.”

Orange County has been under a federal judge’s order since 1978 to alleviate overcrowding. Last year, the Board of Supervisors released a study showing that the county’s jail system, built to house 3,821 inmates, had an average of 5,500 inmates.

During his election campaign last year, Carona promised voters to find a solution to the problem of overcrowding, but proposals for new jails have encountered howls of protest from both residents and local politicians.

Last month, three possible prison sites adjacent to the city of Orange drew fire from that city’s mayor, Joanne Coontz, and former county Supervisor William G. Steiner.

Though plans to expand the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange also were met with opposition by residents, the facility will open space for 384 more inmates in late October.

Officials from California’s Board of Corrections recently inspected the new 2,300-bed facility in California City and found that the bunks are too narrow and that electrical outlets and paper towel dispensers could be fashioned into weapons.

Corrections Corp., the Nashville-based owner of the facility, has 77 jails in the United States, Puerto Rico, Australia and Britain, making it the largest U.S. purveyor of prison cells.