TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Adding 900 beds to each of two Delano-area state prisons would take about two years and rely on the sale of state bonds, officials said Thursday.

They also would generate an estimated 850 jobs and around $86 million in annual payroll to Kern County.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has launched an effort to expand four state prisons at a cost of $810 million, including at North Kern and Kern Valley state prisons.

Corrections spokesman Seth Unger said the two Kern prisons were tops on the list because both are new and have space and support systems for expansion.

And both prisons serve critical inmate populations.

Kern Valley is a maximum-security facility, "the ones we need the most," Unger said.

North Kern has reception center beds, where new prisoners are processed before being sent to other facilities.

"We don't have enough (reception center) beds," Unger said.

Together the two prisons already house more than 10,000 prisoners, even though they were designed to hold about half that many.

The Delano prisons employ more than 3,000 people.

Bond funding for the construction was approved through Assembly Bill 900 two years ago.

These are the first projects to be launched as part of the $7.4 billion bond that may also fund an expansion of Kern County's Lerdo Jail.

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said consideration of the Lerdo Jail expansion could be brought to the Kern County Board of Supervisors within 90 days now that bond markets have opened up again.

Unger said the Kern Valley and North Kern projects will need to clear a series of bureaucratic hurdles, project design and funding through the sale of bonds before construction.

"We are still looking at a couple of years," he said.

But officials with the correctional officers union say simply adding beds isn't the kind of reform intended by AB 900.

"We need to focus on mission, not on beds," said Lance Corcoran of the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association.

He argued that population growth and new crime that comes with it would fill the new beds before they are built.

"The department was going to change incarceration in California," he said. "The plans I've seen so far are just more of the same."

Unger said the new beds would help solve rehabilitation issues.

Every time capacity is increased, the department has a chance to convert gyms and classrooms that are currently housing inmates back into gyms and classrooms, he said.

And the department is also trying to change the way it does business to reduce the number of repeat offenders and give inmates a better shot at a good life when they return to society.

"We're also implementing reforms," Unger said. "We do believe we are going to be able to bring our prison population down at the same time we increase capacity."