Supervisors OK 200 More Beds for Prisoners : Move Will Help Relocation of 500 Inmates While Vista Jail Is Renovated

The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to immediately add more than 200 beds to the county’s honor camps and work-furlough sites to accommodate inmates from the Vista jail who must be relocated while the jail is renovated.

The renovation, an effort to alleviate severe crowding in the county jails, will add 296 beds to the Vista Jail, and is expected to take a year to complete. But the county cannot begin work on the expansion until it finds a way to house about 500 Vista inmates for the duration of the project.

Rich Robinson, the county’s director of special projects, said that under the plan approved by the supervisors Vista inmates with medical problems will be sent to work-furlough centers while incarcerated aliens without local ties will be sent to the honor camps.

Robinson said this will amount to “double-bunking” at the camps which, like the jails, are already crowded.

The county will spend about $300,000 to expand and improve security at the camp sites. The county plans to make more room for Vista inmates in the work-furlough program, which allows convicts to work during the day and return to incarceration centers at night, by sending some “low-risk” offenders now in the program home with electronic surveillance devices that monitor their movements, Robinson said.

The county will also make room for transfers from Vista at other jails by increasing the number of inmates eligible for parole each month by about 200.

“In effect, the county is sending people home early,” Robinson said.

At the same time, the Sheriff’s Department has restricted the list of offenses that merit booking in an effort to reduce the population at the downtown jail so that some of the Vista inmates can be moved there.

All of these steps are expected to add the remaining 300 beds necessary for Vista inmates so that the expansion work may begin.

The county had originally planned to house the Vista inmates in a 600-bed temporary jail to be built next to the Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee. But that project has been delayed by legal challenges. The soonest the temporary jail could be completed is early September, but the Vista jail must be emptied by the end of May if the renovation is to begin on schedule.