Riverside County supervisors have endorsed a strategy that could double the size of three existing jails and restart planning for a Palm Springs-area mega-jail.
The strategy offered by supervisors Marion Ashley and Jeff Stone is meant to give county staff a road map for how the Board of Supervisors wants jail expansions to proceed.
“We really need to go to the whip on the jails situation,” Ashley told his colleagues at a recent meeting. “It’s good for our economy to protect our people. It’s good for our safety and our quality of life.”
The strategy is short on specifics, including construction timetables and how the county will pay for the added jail space. And Sheriff Stan Sniff contends that some parts of the strategy may be unfeasible.
On June 4, the board passed the strategy 4-0. Supervisor John Tavaglione was absent while recovering from a biceps injury.
Jail capacity is one of the top challenges facing supervisors.
Besides needing to keep pace with population growth, the county’s 3,906-bed, five-jail system is under tremendous strain following the start of state public safety realignment, which shifted responsibility for low-level offenders from the state to counties. Under realignment, people convicted of nonviolent, nonserious and nonsexual crimes serve their sentences in county jail instead of state prison.
County jails filled up after realignment started in October 2011 and last year, the county released almost 7,000 prisoners early to comply with a federal court order to ease crowding. Even more early releases are expected this year.
The county jail system wasn’t designed to handle the medical, recreation and other needs of inmates serving multi-year sentences, and the county faces a class-action lawsuit alleging inadequate inmate health care.
The county already is taking steps to add jail beds. Planning is underway to add more than 1,200 beds to the 353-bed Indio jail at a cost of $237 million, $100 million of which is covered by a state grant. The expansion is expected to be open by 2017.
The Sheriff’s Department also is seeking an $80 million state grant to add as many as 380 beds to the 1,520-bed Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility in Banning. Grant money also would pay for more room to run alternative sentencing programs.
And the county is sending jail inmates to fire camps and using electronic-monitoring ankle bracelets so defendants awaiting trial can stay at home instead of jail.
Still, expanding Indio and Banning won’t solve the jail-bed shortage, officials contend. The Sheriff’s Department has said the county will need 4,000 more beds by 2020 and 13,500 beds by 2050, according to Stone and Ashley.
By comparison, Los Angeles County currently has 23,600 jail beds. Los Angeles County has just under 10 million residents while Riverside County’s population is 2.2 million.
The supervisors’ strategy suggests goals for adding beds to Larry Smith, the Robert Presley Detention Center in downtown Riverside and the Southwest Detention Center in French Valley.
The strategy sees room for another 1,600 beds at Larry Smith, 1,500 to 3,000 beds at Southwest and 900 beds at Robert Presley. Combined with what’s coming to Indio, these potential expansions could add 5,250 to 6,750 beds.
Sniff said his department is happy to look at ways to add jail beds. But he said expanding Robert Presley and Southwest isn’t cost-effective.
“Unless there’s something new that’s changed on it, I’m really doubtful that those are panning out,” Sniff said.
A team led by Assistant County Executive Officer George Johnson will flesh out a plan to expand the jails using the supervisors’ strategy. The team, which could deliver a report to supervisors in three to six months, will include representatives from the sheriff’s office, probation and mental health departments.
The strategy also touches on the Mid-County Detention Center, once planned for a site off Interstate 10 in Whitewater east of Palm Springs. The county spent $22 million on studies and land acquisitions for the jail and the original plan called for the facility to have as many as 7,200 beds at full build-out.
The project faced opposition from Palm Springs-area residents who said its visible freeway location could hurt tourism. Supervisor John Benoit, who represents the county’s desert communities, led the push to shelve the project in 2011, saying the county couldn’t afford it.
The strategy doesn’t specify where the mid-county jail should go. Instead, it calls for planning to continue should state or federal funding become available one day.
New jails such as mid-county take years of planning, Ashley said. “We can’t just sit around and say ‘Oh, we have to go to work on Mid-County now,’” he said.
Sniff has said the county will eventually have to look at building a mid-county jail.
Follow Jeff Horseman on Twitter: @JeffHorseman
via PE.com
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