BOARD OKS PLAN TO TRADE INMATES : SOME OF PITCHESS JAIL POPULATION GOING TO TWIN TOWERS.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

When the Twin Towers jail opens Saturday in downtown, some of the county facility's first inmates will come from the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center, in a plan that will send some short-term state prisoners to the Saugus jail and illegal immigrants to the Mira Loma Jail in Lancaster.

Construction on the Twin Towers wrapped in October 1995, but the high-rise Los Angeles jail has been empty ever since. On Thursday, the Board of Supervisors approved a plan that allows the state Department of Corrections to send 1,400 state prisoners to Pitchess. The agreement also calls for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to lease space in the Antelope Valley jail, closed in 1993 because of budget cuts.

Many of the state prisoners expected to be sent to Pitchess will be parole violators, said Undersheriff Jerry Harper, who oversaw the exchange plan for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Pitchess, in turn, will shuttle some of its most troublesome inmates to Twin Towers, where authorities hope the two-man cells will keep them from fighting with each other - a frequent problem in the barracks-style dormitories at Pitchess.

State corrections officials want to send low-risk prisoners, such as those sentenced to less than a year, to Pitchess. The state will lease jail beds from Pitchess as part of a plan to generate millions of dollars for the county.

Representatives from Pitchess and the Santa Clarita station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department regularly attend meetings of the Castaic Town Council because the community is the jail complex's closest neighbor. Sheriff's officials have explained the inmate swap plan, said Phil Mazzeo, a Town Council member.

``It seems like a pretty good thing to me, for a couple reasons. First, (the county) is going to take some of the more maximum-security guys out of (Pitchess) and send them downtown,'' Mazzeo said.

``Second of all, it will generate income for the county, for the Sheriff's Department,'' he said.

``The way it was presented to us, it seems a workable thing,'' Mazzeo added. ``It only makes sense to do something. That building downtown has been sitting, doing nothing for however many years.''

Corrections officials want to lease the county jail space because it would save the state the cost of transporting convicts hundreds of miles from where they were arrested, tried and sentenced to the prison where they'll serve their term.

Riots and violent clashes between inmates, usually pitting Latinos against African-Americans, have been frequent in recent years at Pitchess. Sheriff's Department officials, who run the county jail system, plan to transfer ``shot callers'' - problem inmates known to be instigators of unrest - out of the 125-man open barracks at Pitchess to the two-man cells at Twin Towers.

``They're basically taking the really hard-core ones and shipping them to the Twin Towers jail, so I think it's better for us,'' said Jerry Morrill, another Castaic Town Council member.

``I don't see a problem with that at all. I think we're getting the lesser of the two evils, so that's fine with me,'' Morrill said.

Many of the state parole violators will be those from the Los Angeles County area, Harper said. The department will house these prisoners at the medium-security South Facility at the Pitchess Detention Center complex, he said.

In turn, the county inmates to be moved to Twin Towers likely will be those currently housed at Pitchess' maximum-security North Facility and North County Correctional Facility.

``We'll try to move the more dangerous individuals . . . who create the violent problems for us,'' Harper said. At Twin Towers, he added, ``we'll have a lot more control over the inmates, and the chances of having large-scale riots like we have in the dorms are cut down considerably.''

County jail inmates will be moved to Twin Towers and state prisoners will be moved to Pitchess on an incremental basis, Harper said.

About 190 county jail inmates, mostly from Pitchess, will be moved to Twin Towers beginning Saturday, Harper said.

``If we could identify all the shot callers (at Pitchess), that would be one of our highest objectives - getting them out of those dorms,'' Harper said.