PRISONERS TO STAY PUT

Already Crowded Jails Could Get More Inmates

In the basement at the Ventura County Main Jail last week deputies
searched one man who stood spread-eagle in front of a wall padded
with a blue cushion while in nearby booking rooms small groups of
four, five and even 10 men lay sprawled out and waited to be
transferred to cells upstairs.

After being searched, photographed and then booked, this was the
man's welcome into the packed County Jail.

Like most jurisdictions in California, Ventura County is running out
of jail space. The county's two facilities -- the Main Jail next to
the courthouse and the 12-year-old Todd Road Jail near Santa Paula --
have reached capacity.

As the new inmates are moved upstairs, jailers scramble to find a
place to put them. The new inmates typically sleep on bunks in a
common day room until cell space is available. In other
jurisdictions, mattresses are rolled out and inmates sleep on the floor.

To relieve the crowding in Ventura County, the Sheriff's Department
has siphoned off as many inmates as it could through early release,
work furlough, drug diversion or other programs, said Chief Deputy
Kathy Kemp, who heads the Sheriff's Detention Services Division. The
remaining 1,705 inmates housed in the county's two jails need to be
locked up, Kemp said.

So planners at the Sheriff's Department are looking at building new
cells, but they're not sure how many to build, in part because an
even worse overcrowding issue within the state prison system is
likely to blow back on local jurisdictions.

Prison Capacity Exceeded

Faced with a prison system bursting at the seams, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger is considering a plan that could push those inmates
back into an already overcrowded county jail system. The state has
exceeded its prison capacity by about 70,000 inmates and is under a
court order to deal with the problem. If California fails to come up
with a solution, officials will have to start releasing prisoners
early. As an emergency measure the governor began sending some
inmates out of state, but this week a Sacramento Superior Court ruled
against that relocation effort. The governor plans to appeal.

"I will not release dangerous criminals to relieve overcrowding,"
Schwarzenegger said Tuesday in a prepared statement. "Our prison
system is in desperate need of repair, and the transferring of
inmates out of state is a prudent alternative to the risk of
court-ordered early release of felons. Public safety and the interest
of all Californians should prevail and this challenge to sound public
policy must be defeated."

In January in his preliminary budget, Schwarzenegger proposed another
alternative suggesting that local jails keep any inmates sentenced to
three years or less. The average stay for an inmate at the Ventura
County Jail is about a year.

Population Caps Installed

With the stroke of a pen, the governor could make life more difficult
for police and sheriff's departments across the state. Of the 58
counties in California, 32 have established population caps on their
jails. Of those, 20 were ordered by a court. In places like Los
Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties, the situation is dire,
said Steve Szalay, executive director of the California State
Sheriff's Association.

In Ventura County, where officials are on the cusp of a plan to deal
with a packed jail system, the governor's musings are enough to make
local officials blanch.

Kemp looked at what the governor's January plan would mean for
Ventura County. She estimates that in a year the county's jail
population would double.

"That's a big deal," she said.

Worse, over time the jail overcrowding would be compounded as new
inmates crowd in on the heels of inmates serving sentences. In three
years, the local inmate population could approach numbers planners
didn't anticipate for another two decades.

"It's very significant," said Sheriff's Cmdr. Brent Morris, who
oversees the Todd Road Jail and has just completed a draft of a
jail-needs assessment for the department. "I don't know exactly what
the state program will entail, but the potential is that we'll have
to build twice as many beds."

The Board of Supervisors and County Executive Officer Johnny Johnston
will be getting the draft in the next few weeks. But there are still
open questions about what the state will do and whether it will give
money to local jurisdictions to cope with the overcrowding.

With such big unknowns, it is difficult to say what kind of problems
the county faces. The bottom line is the biggest concern.
Construction of a single cluster could cost between $80 million to
$90 million, Sheriff's Department officials said.

Staffing each node of the jail is costly as well, with each 750-bed
cluster costing about $12 million. There is one cluster there now
with the department's long-term plan calling for three by the year
2025. County officials have prided themselves in how forward-looking
they were when they built the Todd Road Jail in 1995. They developed
a master plan and created a facility that could be fairly easily
expanded to handle the growth in inmates.

But then reality set in. Although Ventura County hasn't seen the kind
of overcrowding that has resulted in Los Angeles County inmates
serving just 10 percent of their sentences, local officials are
scrambling. And their efforts could be complicated further by
whatever the state decides, Kemp said.

One of the reasons for crowding locally is the loss of jail space
when the county closed the Honor Farm near Ojai and a facility in Rose Valley.

But there is a possible silver lining for the county. State officials
are considering a plan that would create as many as 10 "re-entry"
facilities for prisoners. In this scenario, the state has about $4
billion it could use to pay local jurisdictions to build and staff
facilities where state prisoners would be moved before their release.
Although there is some suspicion about whether the state will indeed
cover the costs of operating these facilities, it is looking at
counties that are ready to move.

Because Ventura County already has the land and a plan for jail
expansion, local officials believe they could be well positioned to
qualify for state money to build more capacity.

The Sheriff's Department expects some of these issues to be hashed
out at the Board of Supervisors meetings in the coming weeks.