Delays, Poor Planning in Jail Building Caused Woes

Sheriff John Duffy, elated one day last month after having helped persuade the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to embark on a jail-building program, paused to reflect on the long, and at times frustrating, struggle he has waged for new jail beds over the years.

“In 1963, when I was a young lieutenant, Sheriff Joseph O’Connor had the idea for satellite jails to relieve overcrowding,” Duffy said. “In 1965, the board approved in principle to have the three jails, in Vista, El Cajon and South Bay. We still haven’t quite got them. We don’t have booking in South Bay and El Cajon. We haven’t quite finished what the board approved in 1965, and that’s 20 years ago.”

For San Diego County, which appears on the verge of building a 500-bed jail and a 350-bed honor camp, building new jails has not been easy. Short of money much of the time and short of will at others, the Board of Supervisors has a history of postponing jail construction as long as possible and then building less than what’s needed.

When jails have been built in the past 25 years, they have opened overcrowded and under-designed, plagued by little problems that can add up to big headaches for Duffy and his deputies who run the jails.

“They’ve done a terrible job of planning,” Ed Smith, an official with the state Board of Corrections, said of the county. “It’s almost as if they went off, hired an architect, designed a jail, built it and then gave it to Sheriff Duffy. That’s probably the worst thing in the world you can do.”

But Smith said San Diego County deserves some credit for having built local jails with little or no state money. And county officials say the problem of building jails in urban areas sometimes forces political compromises that make the design seem ill-planned in hindsight, after the necessary compromises have been forgotten.

The county’s experience with the Vista jail is most often cited as local jail planning at its worst.

“Vista is an anachronism,” Smith said. “It was built in the late 1970s with a design drawn up in the 1960s. It’s very dangerous for prisoners.”

The jail was designed when dormitory-style housing for prisoners was in vogue. The 38-bed inmate modules were planned to hold a mixture of drunks, misdemeanants and a few hard felons. But the county couldn’t afford to build the jail, and the plans were put on the shelf.

Ten years later, with overcrowding at the downtown Central Jail growing worse, the old Vista plans were dusted off and updated a bit, and the jail built. In the meantime, modern jail planners had discarded the dormitory style in favor of a series of single cells clustered around an open day-room. And the county’s plan for housing a mixture of mainly low-level offenders in the dorms never came to pass, because the least-dangerous criminals were released on the streets to save room in the crowded jails for felons.

“We got a brand new building with a set of plans probably 15 years old,” Assistant Sheriff Clifford Powell said. “It’s like going down to your Chevy dealer and getting a 1970 Chevy with zero miles on the odometer and in perfect condition. We got a jail really not built to current standards because the county didn’t want to give up the money they’d spent for architect’s plans.”

One of the problems with the dormitory setup is that it is difficult for guards to see and keep track of all the inmates, particularly when the jail is overcrowded, Powell said.

Of the county’s six jails, Vista has had the highest rate of assaults among inmates in five of the past six years. Last year, for instance, Vista, with an average daily inmate population of 373 in a jail designed to hold 246, had 105 inmate-on-inmate assaults and four inmate assaults on staff. By comparison, the South Bay jail, built for 192 inmates and averaging 434, had only 35 inmate assaults on inmates and no assaults on staff. The Vista jail’s outmoded design is blamed in part for that record.

The Vista jail has other problems, too. When the county finally got around to building the jail, it built only the first phase, and a shell for a second phase, which was completed a year later. As a result, the jail has a kind of disjointed design that makes for inefficiencies, Powell said.

A report prepared by Duffy for the three newest members of the Board of Supervisors when they took office a year ago reads as if it could be part of another lawsuit against the county like the one that resulted in a court order to relieve overcrowding at the Central Jail:

“Although overcrowding is the most acute detention problem for San Diego, there are significant problems in three other areas as well: health and sanitation, inability to separate prisoners, and lack of equal access to programs and services.

“The Vista Detention Facility has inadequate space for medical examinations, treatment and patient care; sick female inmates cannot be segregated, and mental health programs are jeopardized by the absence of counseling rooms. Access by the female inmates to the library, medical services and outdoor recreation is restricted, because they must be transported through the jail control and male housing areas.”

Vista isn’t the only county jail plagued by design quirks; nor was it the first.

The Central Jail, opened in 1960, was built with the kitchen on the top floor, which means that supplies must be brought into the building and moved upstairs while food and garbage must be carted downstairs from the kitchen. Powell notes that the elevators and guards’ offices at Central are all at one end of the building, rather than in the middle, so that anyone coming onto a floor must walk a longer distance to cover the area. And guards sitting in their office can’t see the inmates.

The South Bay and East County jails, built as part of county regional centers, were designed with fewer beds than Duffy recommended and were overcrowded almost from the day they opened. Neither jail would be practical to expand, because the South Bay jail is in the basement of the county center in Chula Vista and the East County jail occupies the sixth and seventh floors of the regional center in El Cajon.

The South Bay jail, built with 6-inch windows in the cells, had an escape just weeks after it opened when an inmate punched out the window, chiseled a hole for his head and squeezed through the opening. After that, the county came back and placed electronic sensors on the windows to detect disturbances. At the high-rise El Cajon jail, the plastic windows were reinforced after one inmate was killed and another injured in similar escape attempts.

But the major problem at the two newest jails continues to be overcrowding, and it is a nuisance that especially irks Duffy and his staff because they were so adamant in recommending to earlier county supervisors that there be more beds.

“If we’ve learned anything at all, it’s that every one of our jails has been built too small with no possibility for expansion,” Powell said. “That’s the thing we hope is going to be paramount in everyone’s mind with the next facility we build.”

David Janssen, the county’s acting chief administrative officer, was not with the county when the regional jails were designed. But he said their small size is probably due to attempts by county officials and politicians to quell opposition in Chula Vista and El Cajon.

“Probably the fact that we were able to get any beds at all in the center of those cities was a tremendous accomplishment,” Janssen said. “The state’s problems are a good example of the practical impossibility of siting jails or prisons and then building them.”

John Sauvajot, director of the county Department of General Services, blamed the problems at Vista on the county’s inability, because of financial problems, to build the jail all at one time.

“The design there originally was for a two-wing facility, and that got cut back to one wing and then a women’s facility was added back in,” Sauvajot said. “Then the second wing was added on. So what you have is a situation where the original intent, which would have been a well-coordinated design, got cut back and then incrementally put back together with changing inmate demands as well as changes in jail standards set by the state.”

Funding problems also forced the curtailment of plans for the South Bay regional center, which was supposed to have three buildings but wound up with one, and the El Cajon center, which was originally designed two stories higher than it was built.

Sauvajot said Duffy and his staff have been more involved in the design stages of the latest 296-bed Vista expansion, which is expected to open in 1988, than they were in earlier efforts. And the sheriff appears to be succeeding in persuading the Board of Supervisors to build the next major institution--a 500-bed jail to house inmates before they go to trial--in an open area that would have room for expansion.

“I have every intention of making sure if we build a facility it is needed and we take advantage of all the state of the art available to build the best pretrial detention facility we can,” said Supervisor Susan Golding, who with colleague George Bailey has emerged as a leader on the board on this issue. “I don’t want to build a facility that’s out of date before it’s in the ground.”

That pleases Duffy, who is not modest about the role he sees for himself in planning the future of the county’s criminal justice facilities. If the board had listened to him years ago, it might not have the overcrowding problems it does today, Duffy said.

“You’re going to have problems when you ignore the guy who in my case has been 32 years at this business and you bring in some consultant who may or may not know what he’s talking about,” Duffy said. “The jail expert in this county is the sheriff. I’m the one who’s supposed to run it. That’s my business.”