Toughest Inmates to Test New Jail

After remaining vacant for a year and a half because of budget woes, Los Angeles County’s new Twin Towers Correctional Facility will finally open today, with nearly 200 of the county’s toughest jail inmates shuffled inside for a four-month trial run.

If the gleaming new jailhouse survives its shakedown cruise with prisoners who have been known to bend, unscrew, crack, shatter, rattle or otherwise damage the property in less state-of-the-art lockups, the Sheriff’s Department will open the entire $373-million high-rise this summer to accommodate a total of 4,100 inmates.

The long-delayed opening will have minimal impact on overall jail overcrowding, sheriff’s officials acknowledge, but could help quell the repeated rioting in a 20,000-bed system that is rife with tension.

Sheriff’s officials plan to use Twin Towers to house some of the county’s most hardened inmates--responsible for frequent uprisings at the Peter J. Pitchess complex near Santa Clarita--in two-person, hard-lock cells. They will also use the new jail to house the county’s female prisoners for several years while repairs move forward at the Sybil Brand Institute.

However, Twin Towers, located on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, will not provide enough new beds to increase the time that convicted jail inmates now serve as a result of overcrowding--roughly 23% of their sentences.

“This is not the end of the line,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky of the opening. “This is the first step in a long line toward improving and expanding our incarceration capacity in this county, which we all know is in short supply.

“This begins to turn the ship around.”

Starting at noon today, dozens of prisoners will be escorted through a tunnel leading from the adjacent Men’s Central Jail into the eight-story Tower One.

“We are going to move those inmates slowly throughout the whole building over the next few months,” said Sheriff’s Chief Barry King, who will oversee the start-up. “We are going to see what kind of problems we have, if we have overlooked screws being tightened down or certain security issues being done.”

With badly needed state funding to operate the jail still uncertain, sheriff’s officials believed that it was nonetheless important to push forward with the opening of the jail, having received final approval Thursday from the Board of Supervisors.

Officials hope the decision to start operations will end an arduous, if not embarrassing, chapter in Sheriff Sherman Block’s quest to get the jail up and running.

Construction on Twin Towers was completed in October 1995, thanks to tens of millions of dollars raised through taxpayer-backed bonds. But the lockup has remained closed because the sheriff said he could not come up with the $100 million a year he said was needed to operate the jail.

For a time, sheriff’s deputies who guard the vacant jail were assigned an unwanted task: looking for vagrants breaking in, not inmates breaking out.

Sheriff’s officials say they are relieved that, starting today, those roles will change.

“First of all, the opening is going to have a tremendous psychological impact, not only on the system but on the community,” Block said. “Twin Towers has stood there as a symbol of failure of the criminal justice system to do its job completely.

“And from a practical standpoint, it will give us 2,000 additional high-security beds, which we desperately need within the system.”

The opening of Twin Towers comes about because of a delicate plan that involves leasing out about 1,900 beds at various county jail facilities to state and federal law enforcement agencies. The move would generate about $37 million annually to help offset Twin Towers’ operating expenses--estimated at about $75 million per year.

About 500 prisoners from the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service would be kept at the sheriff’s now-closed Mira Loma jail in Lancaster, and 1,400 state prisoners would go to the sprawling Pitchess Detention Center north of Santa Clarita.

But on Thursday, the Board of Supervisors discovered that there was a hitch: The state Joint Legislative Budget Committee has yet to approve the five-year, $137-million contract to lease out space.

According to state sources, legislative analysts--who advise lawmakers--have raised questions about whether the state Department of Corrections needs to lease the jail space from Los Angeles County.

The Board of Supervisors and the Sheriff’s Department, however, said they are confident they will be able to get the necessary funding. County officials spent much of Friday on the phone with officials in Sacramento.

“There are still some issues with the state that need to be resolved,” Yaroslavsky said. “I don’t think they are in the least bit unsurmountable.” He added: “What we have now, instead of a monument to the dysfunction of government, is an example of how innovation and thinking outside the box can work to benefit the public and public safety.”

Jail watchdogs said they wondered if they would ever see this day.

“It seems that things have been set right-side-up,” said Joel Fox, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. “We are actually going to have guards keeping in prisoners instead of keeping vandals out. It’s about time.”

“I still have this idea that I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Paul L. Hoffman, former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, which monitors conditions at the county jails.

Sheriff’s Department officials hope that by opening Twin Towers they will eventually be able to add up to 1,400 new beds to the massive jail system.

Inside the new mauve-colored jail, there are virtually no metal bars. The two-person cells are sealed with tempered glass, providing deputies with better visibility.

Most important, the absence of large dormitories, such as those at other county jails, would enable jailers to quickly lock down the facility if a riot breaks out.

“What it is really going to do is help us manage some of our more problematic inmates in an easier manner,” King said. “We would like to move these guys into a harder facility.”

The jail also includes a massive medical facility, equipped with an advanced air filtration system, aimed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases. However, that portion of Twin Towers will remain closed indefinitely because the sheriff says he does not have enough money to staff it.

“It will be interesting to see how the jail operates, and if there are problems we have not yet identified,” Hoffman said. “Compared to (other jails), it will be a more hospitable environment.”