Riverside County Gets Go-Ahead To Hire Staff For Banning Jail

RIVERSIDE – Sheriff Stan Sniff received the full support of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors today to begin hiring guards and other personnel needed to staff new cell blocks at the county’s Banning jail.In a 5-0 vote, the board affirmed that the Sheriff’s Department wouldhave the $12.6 million Sniff requested to fund 142 new positions in fiscal year 2010-11, in addition to roughly $750,000 for hiring in the current fiscal year.”We’re very pleased with the board’s decision,” the sheriff told CityNews Service.

The expansion of the Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility is expected to wrap up next month, but many of the personnel needed for security and administrative functions have yet to be hired.Sniff warned the board twice last year — in May and November — that he was short of the funds necessary to hire people to work in the new facilities. But faced with a then-$50 million — and growing — county budget deficit, the supervisors shied away from new financial commitments.he $12.6 million in next year’s budget will assure funding to hire 45 sworn law enforcement personnel to work at the jail, 49 non-sworn correctional deputies and 48 “classified” employees, including food service workers, clerks and accountants, according to the sheriff.He doubted all the money that was approved would be needed and predicted the new jail units would be fully operational in 12 months.The two-year, $80 million Smith expansion includes 582 inmate beds in three housing units encompassing 173,000 square feet.With the pending release of some 40,000 convicted felons from state penal facilities — in compliance with a federal judicial panel’s mandate that California’s prison population be reduced for health reasons — opening the new cells can’t come a moment too soon, said Supervisors Jeff Stone and John Benoit.”We are going to have to have the capacity to house more dangerous criminals that we shouldn’t be responsible for housing in the first place,” Stone said, alluding to expectations that the parolees will offend again.”We have to make our facilities function as prisons when they’re detention centers,” he said.Sniff agreed, saying law enforcement officials statewide were preparing for a spike in crime — and greater pressure on local resources.”It scares all of us, with scarce resources and additional loads being dropped on us,” he said. “The county jail is at the front end of the system.

We just don’t have the bed space.”The sheriff said the county has 3,600 inmate beds available, compared to 6,000 in neighboring Orange County. Some 3,500 prisoners were released before the completion of their jail terms in 2008 due to overcrowding in the county jail system, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Supervisor Bob Buster wondered whether talk of risks to public safetyfrom recidivism wasn’t “grossly exaggerated” and suggested more money might be diverted to rehabilitation programs and deputies drawn from other areas to staff the jails.Sniff replied that pulling deputies from the field would leave a gap inpatrols assigned to unincorporated communities.According to the sheriff, in the coming months, he will “laterally”move inmates from older jail units to the new cell blocks, without realizing an immediate net gain in jail space.The shift will instead give sheriff’s officials a chance to exercise the equipment now in place at Smith, as part of a “warranty” check to ensure all the mechanisms are functioning as promised.

“We can’t just let that stuff sit there and not put a load on it,” hesaid. “If anything is broken, it needs to be fixed by the people who supplied it.”