Articles & News

August 15, 2008

Santa Barbara County's re-entry prison plan gets bigger

 

By Leah Etling

Santa Barbara County’s decision to join in the proposal would double the size of the Paso facility to 500 beds

Discussion of whether to put a re-entry prison on state-owned land in Paso Robles is heating up again as corrections officials consider a new round of grant funding, and such a facility could be twice as large as previously proposed.

Sheriff’s Department officials in Santa Barbara County now want to be part of a 500-bed re-entry prison that would be located in Paso Robles.

A previous proposal for the Paso Robles site called for a 250-bed facility to house inmates from San Luis Obispo and San Benito counties (50 of them would be from San Benito).

The larger proposal would include all three counties.

Officials from Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo County and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department confirmed the discussions to The Tribune this week.

San Benito is a partner in the project because its inmate counts are too low to warrant building its own facility.

The ongoing discussions are part of efforts by all three counties to secure state grant funding for local jail projects. To get preferential treatment in the funding process, counties must tell the state where a re-entry prison could be located in their community.

San Luis Obispo County has been proposing a reentry facility here in order to obtain a $25 million grant that would be used to help fund construction of a planned $30 million to $40 million women’s jail.

The state awarded a total of $650 million in re-entry grants in May to eight counties of similar size to San Luis Obispo or larger. San Luis Obispo County was No. 9 on the list then.

The next round of state grants will be doled out Sept. 18.

“We are the next eligible county,” said Chief Deputy Rob Reid of the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department.

Santa Barbara County was awarded funds for a Santa Maria jail, and they had planned a 500-bed re-entry jail to be built adjacent to it.

But the state says the reentry centers can’t be operated by local law enforcement, said Cmdr. Thomas Jenkins of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.

“We do not want to have the state build and operate the facility in Santa Maria,” Jenkins said, because of concern that the community would not support it.

So Santa Barbara County now hopes to sign an agreement with San Luis Obispo County to participate in a regional re-entry project, which would allow them to hold on to their $56 million in grant funds.

San Luis Obispo County is willing to partner with Santa Barbara on the project, and there could be benefits to regionalization, Reid said.

Many of the parolees returning to Santa Barbara County are from Santa Maria, which has social and economic ties to southern San Luis Obispo County, Reid said. Job opportunities could overlap.

Focus on rehabilitation

The newest prison model from the state corrections system is intended to rehabilitate prisoners, providing them with job and life skills during their last year of incarceration.

Corrections officials in Sacramento want all eligible prisoners to have the chance to learn how to hold a job, pay rent, stay away from gangs and other criminal behavior, and avoid substance abuse and drug addiction when they return to their hometowns.

Santa Barbara County has been running a pilot program to test the re-entry concept and has been one of the first counties in the state to do so. The first group of graduates completed their job training and other skills development this summer.

The program is run out of buildings at the Sheriff’s Department but does not have its own facility.

About 85 parolees are participating in the Santa Barbara program now. The county has between 600 and 1,400 parolees come back from state prison each year.

San Luis Obispo County gets between 200 and 300.

Rick Roney, a founder of Santa Barbara’s re-entry effort, believes the state can lower how many people return to prison multiple times with life skills training before they are released.

“I think people have this idea in their mind that if we send people to jail they’ll change their lifestyle and be different,” Roney said. “We’ve got a lot of data that shows that doesn’t work that way.”

State law mandates that prisoners be released to the counties where they were living when they were convicted of their crime.

The youths’ facility

The proposed re-entry prison would be outside the fences of the Estrella Correctional Facility, a former home for young adult offenders near the Paso Robles airport that shut down this summer.

The existing buildings will house two other prison facilities: a 900-inmate medium-security prison and a 100-to- 200-inmate fire camp.

Those uses were announced earlier this year after the state decided to shut down the boys’ school because of budget issues and changes in how prisoners under age 18 are handled. Wards were shipped to other facilities around the state, and 350 employees there were transferred to other jobs.

One of Paso Robles’ concerns about hosting the reentry prison within city limits has been fear that the inmates would be released locally.

But the state law and written assurances from Santa Barbara County that the Sheriff’s Department there will transport their prisoners out of San Luis Obispo County when their terms are up may assuage those fears.

“We want to be good neighbors with Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo,” Jenkins said. “We want to know what their concerns are and mitigate those as best we can.”

The Paso Robles City Council doesn’t yet have the matter on its agenda. City Manager Jim App said Tuesday there are numerous issues to resolve before the plan is scheduled for a council hearing.

Several council members have already indicated their support for the concept.

“It’s a wise move for us,” Councilman Gary Nemeth said, “because it helps us increase our job base and employment market.”