Why O.C.’s ‘Dark Day’ Wasn’t So Bad at All

Brad Gates was an influential sheriff in a politically conservative, law-and-order county when he lobbied supervisors for a new jail in the early 1990s. “Public safety is at risk, and the fate of our families is in your hands,” he informed the five Orange County supervisors, reminding them that the county jails were overcrowded and that the early release of dangerous prisoners was the alternative to a new jail.

So advised and a bit out of their element on such matters, a board majority deferred to Gates and engineered a special election in May 1991 on whether to build a 6,700-inmate jail in Gypsum Canyon. At the time, the county had about 4,300 prisoners locked up on any given day, about 1,000 over its jail capacity.

By a 3-to-1 ratio May 14, 1991, Orange County voters said no thanks to a half-cent on-the-dollar sales tax increase and a new jail.

What, pray tell, happened to the fate of our families?

At the risk of sounding glib, we’re still here. Perhaps more to the point, an issue that dominated local headlines a decade or so ago -- with the presumption the problem would only worsen -- hardly generates a peep anymore.

The memory of how dominant the jail issue was popped back to mind recently after reading about the sad state of the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. The two issues are unrelated, other than to ask with 20 / 20 hindsight how so many people could be so wrong back then about the need for a billion-dollar jail in Orange County.

First, a few more numbers. In the early 1990s, officials touted a report estimating that Orange County’s jail population would reach 6,800 by 1995. By 2006, the report said, it would be 9,850.

On a typical day now, the county has about 5,600 inmates.

Assistant Sheriff Kim Markuson runs the county jail system now but defends the projections of his predecessors. Made in good faith, they were trumped by “historically low crime rates in the county throughout the decade of the ‘90s,” he said. “Nobody really projected the crime rate to be as low as it was.”

On some days, Markuson says, the inmate population passes 6,000 and pushes capacity. But expansion plans at the Theo Lacy and James A. Musick branch jails means the county has kept pace with the inmate population and should keep doing so.

One of the people who urged the county in 1990 to consider alternatives to massive jail-building was UC Irvine criminology professor Henry Pontell. I called him last week to discuss the inmate figures and, while refusing to gloat, noted that the drastically reduced projections are the kind of unforeseen things that can happen while public agencies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on projects.

It is precisely because crime rates can fluctuate, public funds can dry up and demographics shift, Pontell says, that public officials should be cautious about committing huge sums to projects like jails or prisons.

As he argued then, Pontell favors alternative sentencing and increased rehabilitation programs as ways to reduce inmate populations and, therefore, potentially cut into the massive costs of building and operating jails.

It’s good that Orange County isn’t jail-obsessed these days. Former Supervisor Bill Steiner, who joined the board in 1993, concedes that “the taxpayers dodged a bullet” by voting down the Gypsum Canyon jail but thinks the concerns of Gates and others were “well-intended.” And it’s not as though voters were visionaries; they simply didn’t want to be taxed or have a jail built in their neck of the woods.

Still, the Gypsum Canyon story should remind us that, before pulling the trigger on such things, it’s not illegal to entertain contrarian viewpoints.

The tendency is to do what Gates did -- scare the daylights out of people. If he had it to do all over again, the former sheriff might even recant what he said on the day voters shot down his jail, calling it “a dark day for the people of the county of Orange.”

Dana Parson can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.