O.C. Faulted on Jail Squeeze

Crowding in Orange County jails will worsen in coming years because of poor planning by the county, according to a grand jury report released Wednesday.

On average last year, the jails were stuffed with 1,600 more inmates than they were designed to hold. As a result, the Sheriff’s Department, which operates five county and two city jails, had to pay more than $9 million in overtime to guards and other workers.

On average, the daily inmate population was 6,100.

Despite the crowding and projections that the inmate population would continue to grow, only one jail is slated for expansion. The county grand jury report said that wasn’t enough.

“Overcrowding remains a fact and will only become worse during the next five years,” the report stated. The crunch will be exacerbated by the lack of expansion, it added.

Sheriff’s officials expect the growing inmate population to require 2,020 more beds by 2010.

County officials anticipate spending $220 million to expand the James A. Musick Branch Jail in Irvine from 1,200 to 4,400 beds. But the project is still in the planning stages and will take at least five to seven years.

In the meantime, sheriff’s officials said, they’re maximizing jail space and trying to be creative with alternatives to incarceration.

“There are beds where we’ve double-bunked and so forth,” said Assistant Sheriff Charlie Walters, who is in charge of jail operations.

The number of inmates released early because of crowding has dropped significantly, from 19,340 in 1998 to a low of 252 in 2004, but the report still noted the grand jury’s concerns about the 2,057 inmates who were given early release in 2005.

The jury also expressed concern about its ability to conduct future reviews of jail conditions because of the Sheriff’s Department’s response to its information requests. Data that grand juries had requested in years past were not available for a 2005 review. The requested information included types of offenses committed by inmates released early and average numbers of days released early.

Walters said he had not read the report and could not respond to the grand jury’s criticisms.

“We’ll look at what information they wanted and how they requested it, and there’s probably a simple answer,” he said.

The grand jury also studied several city jails’ work-release programs and said they relied too heavily on the “honor system,” with jailers making only occasional, random calls to inmates’ reported employers.