Jail Issue: A Time of Reckoning, a Test of Leadership

“Clearly it is the board’s responsibility to select jail sites and take whatever political heat that comes from that.” --Former Supervisor Ralph Clark, 1984.

The season of political heat is upon us. Some will be tempered by it; others will melt. Tune in the Board of Supervisors in the weeks ahead to see whether your favorite supervisor turns into hardened steel or a pool of wax.

Far off in the distance, you can hear the symbolic rattle of cups against the cellblock doors, demanding action. It has been sporadic before; now it’s building to a crescendo.

It’s time for the board to cast its ballots for a new jail--to vote on this inevitable reflection of the county’s growth with as much conviction as it does when it approves development projects that ensure that growth.

To be sure, it won’t be a popular vote. “Politicians aren’t elected on a platform of building bigger and better jails,” says an official with the American Jail Assn.

The supervisors face the same twin problems as do elected officials across the country when it comes time to build a jail: where to put it and how to pay for it.

Because these problems are genuinely daunting, building a new jail becomes a true test of leadership. That is, you’ll seldom find a grass-roots effort clamoring for a new jail.

So, public officials have to take the lead. However, the board’s performance during the 1980s on the jail issue has been a dizzying display of legerdemain: now you see it; now you don’t.

A few years ago, the county envisioned building one jail near Anaheim Stadium as a short-term solution and then bolstering that with the still-on-the-table Gypsum Canyon site. Needless to say, neither got done, although the board once again is tiptoeing toward the Gypsum Canyon site. Do you think it’s a cheaper buy today?

Now the board finds itself in 1990, grappling with one of the most vexing problems of public policy at a time when it’s in its most precarious fiscal situation in recent years.

In the meantime, the Sheriff’s Department says it has exhausted all reasonable measures to find options to incarceration for lesser criminals, including such things as having about 700 people a day out on community work programs.

Once upon a time, county jails were short-term detention facilities. But tougher sentencing demanded by the public, increased drug- and alcohol-related problems and overcrowded state prisons are contributing to keeping people in county jails for longer stretches. A year’s stay in county jail was once considered extreme. Today, Assistant Sheriff Jerry Krans says, 100 inmates are serving at least a year’s sentence. The average jail term is about 70 days, he says.

The department has done some good things to try to attack the jail problem from another angle--that is, keeping people from returning. To that end, it offers classes in such things as reading, job interviewing, parenting and other usable skills. The department is the state’s largest site for offering high school equivalency tests, Krans says.

That list doesn’t include drug programs at all levels of society, starting as low as kindergarten in some schools. About three of every four inmates is in jail for a drug-related cause, Krans says, figures that parallel national rates.

In short, the county is doing what national experts suggest: attacking jail crowding at various levels.

But there comes a time when jail space simply must be expanded. The Sheriff’s Department says that time came years ago. You’ve probably seen the figures before--a system now rated to hold 3,200 inmates daily is handling 4,400. The system needs 5,600 beds, Krans says.

The supervisors know that. But that admission has usually been followed by hand-wringing and cries of despair.

What has been needed instead has been some enlightened public discussion on the whole corrections quagmire--a problem that the county of Orange surely didn’t invent. Such discussions might have helped sell the public, or at least prepared it for the prickly decisions the board needed to make.

But as usually happens when problems are put off, crisis time has arrived. The jail situation has now succeeded in frustrating everyone from judges to street patrol officers to sheriff’s deputies. There has never been a better time to be a criminal in Orange County.

Yes, what to do about a new jail is a tough problem. No, we don’t have an easy answer.

But then, we didn’t run for county supervisor.