By Jamie Ayalaand and Rocky Salmon, The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.)
Officials from the Riverside County Corrections Planning Unit undertook a study of failures in design and staffing that led to the four-man jailbreak early Tuesday.
Authorities are scrambling to identify what changes need to be made at the Southwest Detention Center, just north of French Valley Airport, and the other four jail facilities in the county to prevent future breakouts.
Three escapees - Ryan Esteban Concepcion, 23; Trung Minh Lu, 22; and Thomas Michael Potter, 24 - were found in a Homeland house Tuesday afternoon.
Nathanial Decarlo Sapp, 18, of Riverside, was arrested at 8 p.m. Wednesday in San Bernardino after investigators stopped a gold Dodge Intrepid on Highway 30, said Riverside County Sheriff’s spokesman Cpl. Dennis Gutierrez.
The prisoners apparently removed a vent and climbed poles to the roof to make their escape, officials said. Authorities declined to release any further details of the escape.
“If someone is determined to do something, they’ll do it. These guys saw something that wasn’t checked, and they took the opportunity,” said Riverside County sheriff’s spokesman Dennis Gutierrez.
More than 3,000 inmates are housed in Riverside County’s jail facilities in Blythe, Indio, Banning, Riverside and French Valley. All are similar, but some are more modern than others.
Assistant Sheriff Stan Sniff said escapes are rare. The last escape in the county was in 1987 at the main jail in Riverside. Seven inmates fled by jumping off a rooftop recreation area and into nearby trees. All were captured; the last was found out of state two weeks later.
Ivan Romero, a senior project architect at San Francisco-based KMD Justice, which specializes in criminal justice facilities, said counties throughout the state are struggling with overcrowded facilities and sometimes resort to makeshift solutions.
This includes creating dormitory-like facilities like at the Southwest Detention Center, which has 15 such rooms. Romero said the cost difference between individual cells and dorms can be millions.
“They’re quicker and cheaper to build,” Romero said, “but not usually the setting where you want to place potentially dangerous criminals, even if they’re awaiting trial.”
During the design of jails, Romero said, security measures should have been considered, including the federal standard of installing security bars in any opening greater than an 8 inches by 8 inches. That would have applied to the shaft that the inmates used to ascend to the roof.
“Normally you don’t expect county people to be versed on the standards, so it’s up to architects to make them aware,” Romero said.
Several contractors were involved in the design of the Southwest Detention Center, which built in 1993, then expanded in 2001 to hold about 1,100 inmates, Gutierrez said.
Correction facility authorities agree that prisoners always think about escaping.
Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections, said most escapes at the state level have been “walk-aways” from minimum-security facilities such as correctional camps.
Of the 1,049 offenders that escaped from an institution, camp or community-based program between 1945 and 2002, 99 percent have been apprehended, according to a Department of Corrections report.
In Riverside County, there are countless attempts to escape, most by way of switching nametags, said Chief Deputy Valerie Hill, who oversees the corrections division.
“But they never make it as far as release,” she said.