Jail fiasco renews talk of staffing

Evidence of lazy and inattentive deputies at Orange County’s Theo Lacy Jail is stoking debate about whether the Sheriff’s Department should staff its jails with career correctional officers instead of sworn deputies.

Acting Sheriff Jack Anderson proposed the switch to lower-paid correctional officers in February as a cost-cutting measure, but he said Wednesday that there could be additional benefits to using correctional officers who want to spend their careers working inside jails.

Grand jury testimony made public this week showed that deputies inside Theo Lacy watched movies, played video games, exchanged text messages and slept while allowing inmate “shot-callers” to enforce jail rules.

Anderson said department supervisors were to blame for the environment at Theo Lacy, and he intends to move forward with a proposal to pull hundreds of deputies off jail duty and replace them with career correctional officers.

He said career correctional officers could develop valuable experience while working at the jails.

“We would have professional correctional officers who look at this as their career and say, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,’ ” Anderson said.

The union that represents sheriff’s deputies has expressed concerns about the proposal, saying any such change would need to be agreed to in contract negotiations.

Wayne Quint, president of the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, said Wednesday that he was also concerned that “you get what you pay for.”

Quint noted that 800 of the county’s 1,900 sworn deputies work in jails and are available to work the streets in the event of an emergency.

Replacing them with correctional officers, who are not permitted to work the streets, could jeopardize public safety, Quint said.

“We’re living in a post-9/11 world, and we have a readily available secondary police force if we need it,” Quint said.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department routinely assigns deputies to work as jail guards for several years before transferring them to patrol or other assignments.

The grand jury testimony was part of a district attorney’s investigation into the Oct. 5, 2006, death of Theo Lacy inmate John Derek Chamberlain, who was sodomized, urinated upon and beaten to death by a mob of inmates while a deputy watched the television show “Cops” and exchanged text messages with friends.

The attack lasted about an hour and took place near the glass-enclosed guard booth where two deputies and a security officer were supposed to be supervising the inmates.

Sheriff’s employees testified that it was common for deputies to bring movies and laptop computers to work. One guard said he remembered staff watching the movie “Blackhawk Down” while on duty. Another testified that deputies sometimes used computers to play video games with guards elsewhere in the jail.

Anderson met for about an hour Wednesday with the FBI and a prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office. An FBI spokeswoman later confirmed the agency would open a preliminary inquiry into whether any civil rights violations occurred in the jail.

“I wanted to talk to them about the potential for civil rights violations,” Anderson said. “I did not want to do anything in my investigation that could compromise anything they might do in the future because I want to be in partnership with them as I look forward and things get uncovered.”

As a result of the grand jury testimony, Anderson suspended five employees, including three guards who were in a security booth when Chamberlain was slain. He also launched what he said would become the largest internal-affairs investigation in the history of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Anderson said he believed the problems exposed in the Chamberlain investigation were in large part the responsibility of jail supervisors who allowed performance to deteriorate without intervention.

“I won’t say, ‘If we had correctional officers this wouldn’t have happened,’ ” Anderson said. “If the supervisors weren’t watching correctional officers this could have happened. There has to be accountability.”

Anderson has no firm timetable for a switch to correctional officers. Several of his management staffers were planning to meet today with Riverside County sheriff’s officials, who for years have used correctional officers in county jails.

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stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com