First Adult Pre-Trial Facility pods opened
Realignment fuels local jail expansion
By David Marsh
Tulare County - AB 109 is presenting a unique set of challenges in 58 different ways, as officials in each of the state's 58 counties are quickly finding out.
In Tulare County, the transition spurred by AB 109 appears to be going fairly smoothly. According to Tulare County sheriff's Capt. Robin Skiles, who heads the jails division, a 37-bed pod at the Adult Pre-Trial Facility was recently opened to accommodate the county's growing male inmate population, while a 48-bed pod has been activated to handle the expanding number of female inmates.
New staffing hires for each of the reopened pods came from AB 109 funds provided by the state, said Skiles.
In other parts of the Valley, AB 109-related realignment is causing some serious overcrowding issues. Corrections officials in Fresno, Kings and Kern counties are quickly finding themselves overwhelmed by the numbers of additional inmates received since Oct. 1 when the state officially began diverting formerly prison-bound non-serious, nonviolent and non-sex offenders away from the state's chronically overcrowded state prisons and into chronically overcrowded facilities in each of the counties.
At least so far, Tulare County appears relatively unaffected by the overcrowding chaos, due in large part to the luxury of having 235 long-unused beds in its Adult Pre-Trial Facility.
To date, a total of 46 non-non-nons have received county sentences since Oct. 1, in addition to 78 parolees facing revocation hearings, figures that are well within the projections of 30-40 non-non-non inmates per month county officials had been told to expect by the California Department of Corrections.
Each of the surrounding counties (Fresno, Kings and Kern) were dealing with severe jail overcrowding issues in their own jails prior to the Oct. 1 realignment plan kickoff. And each has since received numbers of non-non-non inmates well beyond those that had been projected by the CDCR. As a result, each of the three counties has been forced to resort to early releases of inmates to ease jail overcrowding.
Each of the inmates sentenced under AB 109 is eligible for half-time credits and non-non-nons, as well as the parolees who have been returned to custody, are eligible for early release in the event that it becomes necessary to relieve jail overcrowding according to Skiles, who said that at the present time, his department has no plans to step up early releases.
The upper end of the sentencing range of the new non-non-nons being redirected to Tulare County, which had until recently held constant at a maximum of four years, is now at five years, Skiles said, adding that his department continues to consider applying for jail expansion funds under AB 900 for a proposed new jail facility in the south county.
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