The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The Amador County Board of Supervisors Tuesday passed a resolution to oppose the proposed $48 million expansion, which is the subject of a special session of the legislature called by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger specifically to deal with prison overcrowding.

"The Department of Corrections is acting like the big monster coming in and rolling over the top of us," according to Supervisor Richard Forster. By pushing the governor's $6 billion prison expansion building plan through in a special session, Forster said, the state is trying to "just jam it down our throats."

"These communities are not being given much say in this," he said. "By the end of the month, it's probably going to be said and done."

Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Richard Vinson noted that the addition of 400 beds to the prison would bring the institution's population to 4,383. Originally it was designed for 1,700 beds, but overcrowding has meant the addition of 2,283 beds, for a total of 3,983 beds now.

Everyone who spoke at Tuesday's board of supervisors' meeting agreed that the prison is not a "good neighbor."

Vinson noted that the county provides numerous services to the prison, including services of the district attorney, pubic defender, coroner and public health departments. "Not only are these not paid when services are rendered," he said, "but sometimes they are not even paid in the same fiscal year, or maybe at all."

Ione City Councilman Jerry Sherman, noting the prison's present excess population of nearly 2,300, said, "We need to stop it now, before it goes any further."

Sherman said inadequate sewage treatment at the prison has resulted in the city's monitoring wells "coming up dirty."

"They are putting stuff in the groundwater," he said. "It's not from our sewer plant." He claimed that employees of the state's Regional Water Quality Control Board have been told not to check on water quality conditions at the prison. "If we tried to do anything like what they are doing now," Sherman said, "we would be shot down in a minute."

After the meeting, Julio Guerra, chief operator for the city of Ione's wastewater treatment plant, told the Ledger Dispatch that he had toured the prison's sewage treatment facility and characterized it as "hopelessly overloaded."

While it was built to treat 740,000 gallons of sewage a day, Guerra said, he was told by prison employees that it averages more than 900,000 gallons a day and at peak usage, hits surges that, if continued throughout the day, would amount to 2 million to 3 million gallons a day.

While praising the prison's sewage treatment operator as "very conscientious," Guerra said that "they need to fix what they have and bring what they have up to the level required to handle the current population." City monitoring wells between the prison and the nearby Castle Oaks Golf Course, he said, have seen higher concentrations of nitrates than are allowable.

He stressed that that contamination poses no risk to the public, because it is at least 10 to 20 feet beneath the ground, and also poses no risk to the city's drinking water, because that water is piped in by the Amador Water Agency from surface water sources in the mountains. But, Guerra said, "There may be some private wells that could be impacted by that kind of thing."

Although the issue was not slated for a public hearing, the board heard comments from various people who wanted to contribute to the discussion, including Undersheriff Karl Knobelauch, who said he is a neighbor of the prison.

"I live in the glare of Mule Creek State Prison," Knobelauch said, adding that traffic during the shift changes at the prison is a serious problem. "Employees have been arrested for (offenses) up to manslaughter for the way they drive," he said.

Another neighbor of the prison, Virginia Silva, who lives adjacent to Mule Creek, claimed that in the summertime, when the creek is mostly dried up, a few springs leave "potholes of water" that she described as "stinking black sewage in our creek." She claimed that the prison has been dumping sewage directly into the creek.

Guerra, the city's wastewater plant operator, later said he saw no evidence that the prison was allowing sewage to flow into the creek.

Brian Parriott, spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in Sacramento, also denied that that was occurring. The claim, he said, had been made a few days earlier. "Mule Creek Prison denies any raw sewage is going into the creek," Parriott said. "They said if there was sewage in the creek, it didn't come from the prison."

Jim Scully, who said he lives a mile due south of the prison, complained of noise, traffic and light pollution from the prison. "The noise," he said, "is unbelievable."

Scully also said that twice he had been personally "run off the road by men wearing prison guard uniforms."

As for the light pollution, Scully said that although only two towers are manned at the prison at night, all the towers are fully lit up. He claimed that the lights were left on primarily so guards could walk between the towers without tripping. "I recommend a $3 item," he said. "A flashlight."

Scully also complained that "a full 30 percent" of the inmates come from Los Angeles County. "To my knowledge," he said, "there's no prison in Los Angeles County."

After hearing the comments, the supervisors voted unanimously to pass a resolution in opposition to expansion of the prison. The resolution notes that the residents of Ione voted in 1994 to oppose prison expansion, that the Department of Corrections never fulfilled conditions of the original Environmental Impact Report and are proposing to expand the facilities without adequate environmental review.

The resolution also noted that excess sewage generated at the prison appears to be degrading the environment, that the $320,000 the state is proposing to pay for mitigating impacts to local agencies is "woefully inadequate" and that local jurisdictions do not have enough time to properly review the proposal.

Supervisors Forster and Louis Boitano were appointed to an ad hoc committee to lobby the legislature in an attempt to keep the expansion proposal from being approved.

Parriott said in a telephone interview that the expansion is just a proposal, and that the department is "not at the stage of building anything." The expansion, if approved, he said, would not be immediate, but would begin within a four-year period and only after an Environmental Impact Statement was completed, giving both governments and citizens an opportunity to participate.

County Administrative Officer Pat Blacklock, however, said after the meeting that current law exempts Mule Creek from the California Environmental Quality Act. Previous construction at the prison was exempted, he said, and "the rumors we are hearing is that it could all happen in the final days of the legislature's session, leaving the community very little time for analysis and comment."
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http://www.ledger-dispatch.com/news/newsview.asp?c=192653