Court Opinion

ID: 9861406
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:57:48.464257+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:28:24.103450
License: Public Domain

GARDNER, P. J.
I concur.
I have nothing to add to Justice McDaniel’s scholarly analysis in which he utterly demolishes the efforts of Mr. Gatts to elevate this picayune situation into an issue of constitutional proportions. However, as the Presiding Justice of this court and the one charged with its administration, I begrudge the time wasted in this case.
The judicial fabric of this court is already stretched to the breaking point. The five justices of this court, with the invaluable help of our dedicated but anonymous staff attorneys, are grinding out about 70 opinions per month. By primitive fingers and toes arithmetic, this comes to about 13 opinions per month per justice. Each opinion involves not only the time devoted to study, review, research, and the writing of an opinion, but to independent review of that opinion by two other members of the court. N eedless to say, this involves a substantial amount of judicial time.
We must, by law, write an opinion in every case in which a direct appeal is taken from an appealable judgment or order. In addition, we process about 50 to 70 applications for extraordinary writs per month —habeas corpus, prohibition, mandamus and writs of review. Each of these applications involves a considered judgment as to whether or not to issue an alternative writ. If, after careful consideration, we determine that an alternative writ be issued, an opinion is then added to our already substantial caseload. We review these matters carefully. Insofar as habeas corpus is concerned, we issue alternative writs only if a fundamental right is involved. When this matter was originally presented, we determined, properly I submit, that the decision as to whether Mr. Gatts sits in a single cell or a four-man cell in defense of his beard while he served his five weekends in jail did not involve a fundamental constitutional right nor did it present any important question of law. It was and is a piddling case, its importance resting comfortably somewhere between insignificant and inconsequential.
*1037To clear the air, I should point out that I am not anti-beard—far from it. If the sheriff had ordered that prisoners shave their beards and have crew cuts, I would have been among the first to man the barricades against this unreasonable intrusion into the lives of those citizens who are unfortunate enough to become his prisoners. However, the sheriff has not ordered that Mr. Gatts shave his beard. The sheriff does not care whether Mr. Gatts has a beard that grows to his navel or hair that grows to his buttocks. All the sheriff says is that those with beards present a problem in identification, in hygiene, in the prevention of escape, in supervision, and in discipline. For that reason he simply puts them into a different kind of security. Some jails have this rule, some do not. However, it is not for us to tell any sheriff how to run his jail. It is only when, in the operation of that jail, the sheriff violates the fundamental right of a prisoner that the courts become involved. This leads me to a discussion of county jails.
The operation of a county jail involves monumental problems of security, of supervision, of identification, of discipline, of maintenance, of regulation and of administration. A county jail is not a prison. It has a highly transient population as contrasted with the stable, long-term population of a prison. It has all the problems of a prison, a commercial hotel, and the emergency ward of a hospital.
I do not pretend to know anything about the operation of the San Bernardino County jail, but I do know something about the operation of the Orange County jail and I feel that all county jails in California probably face the same problems.
The average stay in a county jail is of limited duration. About one-third of all those booked into a county jail are released within a few hours. About one-half are released within a week and the average stay in a county jail is something in the neighborhood of 30 days. A county jail has a polyglot population which may contain vicious hardcore criminals and at the same time contain stable members of the community whose only departure from the paths of probity have been the failure to respond to overdue parking tickets. County jails usually contain an alarming number of persons who have merely been arrested on plain drunk charges. The stay of these individuals is usually measured in terms of hours rather than days. A county jail may contain convicted misdemeanants whose terms may not exceed six months and in most cases the terms are considerably less than 30 days. A county jail may contain felons who are serving time as a condition of probation, not to *1038exceed one year. A county jail contains presumed innocent persons who are awaiting trial and who may be charged with any offense imaginable. A county jail contains convicted murderers, robbers, rapists, and many other felons convicted of equally serious offenses who are waiting sentence after having been convicted. A county jail has men among its population. It has women among its population. It has work crews of trusties who, in Orange County at least, work in the county hospital, the animal shelter, and on the county parks and beaches. A county jail has those who are on work furlough and these persons are in and out of the jail eveiy day. A county jail may range in population and size from enormous institutions holding hundreds or thousands of individuals in a large metropolitan area to one-cell jails found in the basement of the county courthouse in rural areas where the inmates are fed by the sheriff’s wife.1 A county jail has a large transportation problem as it delivers those waiting trial to the various courts scattered throughout the county. In a county the size of San Bernardino, this presents awesome problems in logistics and it goes without saying that a county jail numbers among its clientele a substantial percentage of individuals who would like to depart, many without awaiting due process of law.
And a county jail has inmates who are serving weekends. These are a real pain in the neck. Often as not they show up drunk and in an alarming number of cases they attempt to smuggle contraband into the jail via every orifice of the human body.
Now, if the sheriff, faced with all these problems of management, logistics, identification, hygiene, maintenance, regulation and administration, wants to put those with beards into one cell and those without beards into another, it is simply no business of the courts. The jailer may decide to divide up his charges by size, age, sex, appearance, color of eyes, prior record, or first initial of the last name (“All right, everyone from A to M gets a single cell, N to Z go into the holding tank”). Any or all of these classifications may seem arbitrary but they are necessary in the operation of a jail and none of them violate any fundamental constitutional right. The grand jury may issue critical reports of the jail, the board of supervisors may issue directives, various commissions and committees may view with alarm, an aroused citizenry may elect another sheriff, but the courts do not attempt to tell the sheriff how to run his jail.
*1039This case, in my opinion, is a classic example of the “Trivialization of the Constitution” so eloquently described by Justice Macklin Fleming in his excellent work, The Price of Perfect Justice. As Justice Fleming says at pages 129-130: “Trivialization sets in when the range of fundamental constitutional rights begins to be routinely used by the courts to justify judicial regulation of administrative decisions of the smallest moment—with the consequences that a sort of Gresham’s Law operates under which bad judicial decisions drive good ones from public notice.” Thus, I submit that the use of precious judicial resources in a determination whether Arlin J. Gatts should, in defense of his beard, sit in a single cell or a four-man cell when he does his five weekends in jail is inexcusable. The use of the Great Writ for this purpose debases that document. Additionally, the time devoted to this inconsequential case has denied some worthy litigant his day in court. Once an individual becomes involved in the judicial process, his life, to that extent at least, hangs in abeyance until that process reaches a conclusion. Thus, the judicial process must eventually come up with an answer to the litigant’s problem. Hopefully that answer will be a correct one, but even an incorrect answer is better than no answer at all. People can live with an injustice which, after all, is usually in the eyes of the beholder. However, people cannot live with uncertainty. Once a decision is made, a person can live with that decision be it good or bad. But a person cannot live with no decision. Thus, it is essential that all cases be disposed of as promptly as possible. Thus, all of those enmeshed in the judicial process wait with such patience as they can muster as this court and others similarly situated slowly grind through the reviewing process until a final decision is reached. Any time unnecessarily devoted to paltry or trivial matters delays to that extent the determination of finality in all of the worthy cases which flood our judicial system.
I submit that the original decision of this court not to issue an alternative writ was a proper decision.

 Several years ago the sheriff" of a small Northern California county decided it would be cheaper to feed his charges frozen TV dinners. Prior to that time his wife, an excellent cook, had been feeding the prisoners. The sheriff" told me that after he made the change, the crime rate dropped sharply in that county.