Lawyers Admit Defeat in Plan to Stop Prison Proposed for Lancaster

Lawyers preparing for the second round of a legal battle against a proposed state prison in Lancaster conceded Monday that they have no chance of stopping the prison at a court hearing this week.

An attorney for Lancaster said lawyers have dropped their strongest remaining argument: A challenge to the constitutionality of 1987 state legislation that calls for the 2,200-bed facility to be built in the western part of the desert city.

“When we looked carefully at the law and previous cases, we just did not feel the constitutionality argument had merit,” said lawyer David Mann. “We are looking this week not so much at stopping the prison as at mitigating the impact of the prison, making it a lower-intensity prison that will be more palatable to the community.”

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge will hear arguments Wednesday in the second part of the lawsuit filed in January by Lancaster and Los Angeles County. In a hearing last month on the first part of the suit, a judge rejected challenges to the state’s environmental review of the 252-acre prison site.

The city and county have appealed that ruling. Mann said the last chance for prison opponents to block construction will be a hearing on the appeal in the spring. Grading began this month at the site of the prison, scheduled for completion in 1992.

Other than environmental challenges, the fundamental argument in county and city lawsuits had been to attack the constitutionality of Senate Bill 18, the 1987 legislation mandating construction of the Lancaster prison and a companion prison in East Los Angeles. The bill was a compromise between the two political parties seeking a home for unpopular penal facilities, placing one prison in the heavily Democratic East Los Angeles area, the other in the predominantly Republican Antelope Valley.

Opponents had contended that the bill violated a rule in the state Constitution--requiring that legislation address only a single subject--on grounds that two prisons amounted to two subjects.

But written arguments filed in Superior Court this month make no mention of the constitutionality issue. After intense review of the “single-subject” rule and case law, Mann said, lawyers decided the argument was weak because constitutional language appears to allow for the interpretation that the two prisons are a single subject.

“It really wasn’t there,” he said. “Those would have been very strong arguments, you could stop the prison cold. . . . But the subjects really have to be unrelated.”

Instead, lawyers will assert that the bill authorized only a medium-security prison, not the combination maximum- and medium-security facility now being built. Mann said the city will ask the judge to order the state to build an exclusively medium-security prison and expand plans for a “greenbelt,” a buffer area of trees blocking the view from the surrounding area.

The decision to focus this week on mitigating the prison’s impact, rather than blocking construction, caught leaders of an anti-prison residents committee in Lancaster by surprise. Committee Chairwoman Danielle Lewis criticized the move.

“Even if they are successful in changing the security level, we still have a prison,” she said. “I am not pleased to see them water down any of the challenges they have made.”

Although lawyers still hope to win a change of the prison site next year with the appeal on environmental issues, Lewis said the delay will hamper her group’s efforts to lobby legislators to find another site. Any compromise will be more difficult after the state begins work on a $50-million construction contract for prison housing units, to be awarded in December, Lewis said.