|
|
| Jails bumping against overcrowding limit |
| By Jonah Owen Lamb |
| Published: 04/29/2009 |
|
The Merced County Sheriff's Department may be in violation of a long-standing federal court order setting limits on the jail system's population, according to court documents. The 1993 federal injunction -- still in effect -- mandates that the county jail system must release inmates if the system as a whole reaches 90 percent of the facility's capacity. On Tuesday, the Latorraca Correctional Center was over the state inmate cap of 564 by 31 inmates, according to the facility. The 189-capacity downtown Merced County Jail had 145 inmates on Tuesday. The Sheriff's Department contends it isn't in violation of the order since the injunction only applies to the main county jail, not Latorraca. But the county's former sheriff, Tom Sawyer, who was in office when the agreement was signed, seems to disagree. In a letter at the time Sawyer wrote: "I am enjoined by a federal court order from allowing the population level in the Merced County Jail system to exceed its Board of Corrections rated capacity." The federal court order requires the sheriff to release inmates once the system reaches 90 percent of its state-mandated capacity, said Sawyer, who was Merced County's sheriff from 1990 to 2001. "As I recall, that was what the agreement was," he said Tuesday. In 1993, Merced County Jail inmate Nicholas Torres filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court for the Eastern District of California against the county of Merced and the sheriff for overcrowding in the jail. The suit argued that overcrowding violated inmate rights. The outcome of that lawsuit led to an injunctive order dictating how the jail system's overcrowding was to be dealt with. Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
MARKETPLACE search vendors | advanced search
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
|
Comments:
No comments have been posted for this article.
Login to let us know what you think