Authorities say a parolee has surrendered after a brief standoff with a San Diego police SWAT team at a motel. No injuries are reported.

U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Omar Castillo said officials heard two shots from a room at the Days Inn & Suites in the city's Del Cerro area Monday morning. Officials were there to serve a warrant on 30-year-old Cecil Wiley for violating parole on a state firearms conviction...

An initiative to reform the city's debt-ridden pension system, which has qualified for public vote, will be taken up by the City Council Monday.

The council is legally obligated to place the measure on an upcoming election ballot since it received enough petition signatures from residents. Supporters want it scheduled for the June 2012 primary and said on Friday they were worried opponents would try to delay it until November.

The measure calls for new city hires -- other than police officers -- to be given 401(k) plans instead of being enrolled in the employee pension system...

A parolee is under arrest after crashing his car into a parked van and running off, leaving his 9-month-old baby and injured wife inside the car.

Police said 28-year-old Kenneth Biggs Junior was behind the wheel and possibly under the influence when he crashed his car on the 4100 block of Clairemont Drive at 2:30 a.m. Monday.

Biggs then ran off, leaving his baby, his injured wife and another family member in the car, according to investigators.

Firefighters had to use the Jaws of Life to quickly get them out...

A 67-year-old woman was recovering in the hospital on Sunday after she was beaten by her adult son, La Mesa police said.

Investigators said the beating happened early Sunday morning at the woman's condo in the 7900 block of University Avenue in La Mesa.

La Mesa police officers said the woman suffered major injuries to her head and face. Doctors described the woman's injuries as potentially life-threatening and had the woman transferred to Sharp Memorial Hospital's trauma center...

A 32-year-old parolee suspected of burglarizing vehicles was arrested Tuesday after leading deputies on a vehicle chase, authorities said.

At about 12:15 p.m., sheriff's deputies saw parolee-at-large Deondrae Dunn break into two vehicles at the Blue Sky Preserve, Sgt. William Giltner said. He said the deputies tried to stop Dunn, but he got into his vehicle and fled west on Espola Road.

Deputies driving patrol cars tried to pull over Dunn's vehicle, but he refused to stop, Giltner said. He said Dunn ran a red light at the intersection of Rancho Bernardo and Pomerado roads, and continued west on Rancho Bernardo Road...

EL CAJON, Calif. -- A transient parolee pleaded not guilty Thursday to kidnapping and rape charges stemming from the alleged abduction and sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl and a similar attack on a woman in East County.

David Joseph Lascelles, 49, was ordered held on $1 million bail.

Lascelles got together with the teen Monday morning on the pretense of taking her Christmas shopping, sheriff's Sgt. Justin White alleged.

After the two arrived at a Wal-Mart store in unincorporated El Cajon, Lascelles allegedly pulled a pistol on the girl, took her cell phone and forced her to lie on the floor of his Mitsubishi Eagle...

Two elementary schools were locked down briefly on Tuesday as San Diego police and state parole agents chased, then arrested, a fugitive parolee on Birch Street in southeastern San Diego.

Parole agents and police were watching a Birch Street apartment about 11 a.m. when the parolee they were looking for came outside and saw a black and white patrol car, police Lt. Bill Stetson said.

The parolee ran, dodging through yards and scaling fences as officers chased him. Officers found the fugitive’s shoes where they fell off him as he ran, Stetson said...

Investigators are looking for a 25-year-old man who ran from police Sunday night, leaving behind a borrowed car, drugs, stolen property, and a passenger, who was arrested.

Police said an officer pulled over two men in a Ford Explorer for a traffic violation on Lake Murray Boulevard about 7:30 a.m. Sunday. As the SUV rolled to a stop, the driver jumped out, scaled a wall and ran off.

The officers couldn’t catch him, but detained the male passenger...

...This year, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will cut $250 million in funding for adult rehabilitation programs, including $50 million for parole operations. Places like the Freedom House are among the casualties of the state's cuts, which refocus limited resources on parolees with a higher risk of recidivism.

But the majority of inmates set to be released under the state's plan to reduce its prison population will be low-risk offenders. The state plans to reduce its prison population by 6,500 in the next year and as many as 40,000 in years to come under a program known as non-revocable parole. They will not be supervised by parole officers.

As a result, service providers say, those parolees will lose eligibility for programs like the California New Start program, which helps parolees find jobs. A parole officer's referral is required...

State prison authorities said Wednesday that destroying parole agent field notes on convicted sex offender John Albert Gardner III from a 2000 molestation case had no bearing on preventing the murder of Poway teenager Chelsea King.

Scott Kernan, an undersecretary with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, also told an Assembly committee that Gardner remained on parole -- rather than being sent back to prison on a 2007 violation -- based on the recommendation of the field agent supervising him.

But a critic of state parole policy, former Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, later said Kernan’s testimony is not credible because he did not have the field files to know.

For example, Spitzer believes it was a supervisor -- and not the field agent -- who allowed Gardner to continue living close to a school in violation of his parole conditions, said Spitzer, now an Orange County prosecutor...

A wanted parolee who refused to come out of his mother's home surrendered to police after a brief standoff Tuesday.

Officers with the U.S. Marshal's Fugitive Task Force tried to arrest the 24-year-old man at the home on Connecticut Avenue near Wisconsin Avenue about 4:30 p.m. He did not obey their orders to come outside and SWAT and K9 officers were called to help, La Mesa police said.

The man surrendered shortly before 6 p.m. No injuries were reported…

On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Mark Faucette, vice president of the Amity Foundation, a nonprofit substance-abuse-treatment provider, will be at Donovan State Prison in Otay Mesa, saying goodbye to the roughly 500 inmates currently enrolled in Amity's Right Turn program. The highly regarded program, held up as a national model for effective prisoner rehabilitation, is being closed down, a casualty of state budget cuts.

Last week, Elias Contreras, the prison's associate warden, told a KPBS reporter that Right Turn would be replaced with a 90-day detox program. That's actually not the case: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Peggy Bengs confirmed for CityBeat on Tuesday that Donovan is one of eight prisons statewide that won't provide any sort of professional in-custody substance-abuse treatment. Rather, those facilities will rely entirely on outside volunteers from programs like Narcotics Anonymous and inmates who've been trained as substance-abuse counselors…

A lawsuit filed by a now-deceased man over inappropriate medical care while he was in the custody of U.S. immigration officials in San Diego is set to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Francisco Castañeda, an immigrant from El Salvador, died in February 2008 after a battle with penile cancer. Castañeda had sought medical care for symptoms while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a contract detention facility in San Diego, and later at an agency facility in the Los Angeles area.

Castañeda, who had been in the United States since age 10, had landed in detention after a short drug-related sentence in state prison triggered deportation proceedings…

A parolee-at-large rammed an undercover police car with his vehicle on a South Bay street Wednesday afternoon, then led a short road chase that ended when he crashed off a freeway exit and was arrested.

The pursuit began in Chula Vista about 2:15 p.m., apparently when the suspect realized he was being followed by an unmarked San Diego police vehicle, SDPD spokeswoman Monica Munoz said.

The parolee sped over surface streets briefly, then got onto Interstate 5 and headed south as officers gave chase, Munoz said…

With a $1.2 billion budget hole and a recent federal court order to address overcrowding, the pressure is growing to thin California's bulging prisons.

Now comes the trick: figuring out how can it be done without jeopardizing public safety.

California's 33 prisons house more than 150,000 inmates, almost double the amount they were designed to hold.

Last week, a federal court ordered California to empty its prisons by more than 40,000 inmates within two years. The state says it will appeal…

A lawsuit filed by the family of a man who died in police custody raises questions about how officers restrain individuals who are resisting arrest. On May 29, 2007, Ramel Henderson, then 51, lost consciousness while San Diego Police officers attempted to put him in what's known as "maximum restraint," where a subject is handcuffed and placed on his stomach while officers bind the person's ankles and then attach the ankle cuff to a waist cord.

Henderson never regained consciousness and died several hours later at Paradise Valley Hospital in National City. On Monday, Oct. 6, Anthony Willoughby, an L.A. attorney representing Henderson's family, told a federal magistrate judge that the police procedure violated Henderson's civil rights.

Maximum restraint, as applied by the San Diego Police Department, is a modified version of so-called "hogtying," where an unruly subject's handcuffs and ankle cuffs are connected behind the person's back. Hogtying has been banned by some law-enforcement agencies—including San Diego—after a number of hogtied subjects suffocated to death. According to the San Diego Police Department's written procedures, even maximum restraint "should be used as a last resort…"

A minimum security inmate who escaped from a state prison in San Diego has surrendered to authorities.

Prison spokesman Lt. Michael Stout says 24-year-old Manuel Casillas turned himself in Tuesday to state correctional officers at his sister's home.

Casillas escaped from prison on Sunday. Casillas was serving time for second degree burglary. He had been in the prison for about two years and is scheduled to be paroled in two months…

Authorities are still searching today for a minimum-security inmate who escaped the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa on Sunday.

Manuel Casillas, a 24-year-old inmate serving time for a second-degree burglary conviction, was last seen at Sunday's 6 p.m. inmate count, according to prison officials. Corrections officers discovered him missing at 9:30 p.m. during another inmate count, according to officials.

Casillas was sentenced to the male prison on June 20, 2006 and scheduled to be paroled Oct. 25, according to officials. The prison houses about 4,700 minimum, medium and maximum security inmates…

A convict serving a life term at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility attacked a guard with a makeshift knife Tuesday, leaving him with non-lethal wounds and prompting a lockdown at the prison.

The inmate assaulted the officer with an altered disposable razor as the victim was beginning his shift and approaching his work area about 8 a.m., said Lt. Michael Stout, a spokesman for the Otay Mesa-area state penitentiary.

"The officer was able to defend himself, preventing additional injuries, until responding staff arrived to gain control of the inmate," Stout said…

An inmate who escaped from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility over the weekend was picked up by San Diego police on Monday and returned to prison, authorities said.

Ryan McKnight, 32, walked away from the prison's Minimum Support Facility on Friday night. Prisoners who are housed there are considered low-risk and often participate in work furlough programs, said Kim Siebel, a state Department of Corrections spokeswoman…

A court-appointed receiver charged with overseeing health care in the state's prison system wants to build a 1,500-bed medical facility in Otay Mesa, part of a $7 billion statewide package to improve the quality of treatment for prisoners with chronic conditions.

A federal judge yesterday approved the plan by the receiver, J. Clark Kelso, to improve prison medical care, but funding is unresolved for the facility near the Richard J. Donovan prison and up to six others around the state. The state Senate has twice voted down plans to borrow money to pay for the upgrades…

City officials yesterday accused the county of failing to thoroughly analyze and mitigate the effects of a larger Las Colinas jail in a draft environmental report released in April.

That report should be significantly revised and re-released to the public, Santee officials said in a letter to the county. "There's a lot more work to be done," Santee City Manager Keith Till said.

Santee residents and officials have been staunchly opposed to a county proposal to replace the 810-bed jail in the center of the city with a bigger jail. Las Colinas, a worn-down, 1960s-era facility, has been on the county's list for replacement for years. It is the only all-female jail in the county…

A class-action lawsuit alleging chronic overcrowding at an immigration jail on Otay Mesa was settled Wednesday. The lawsuit said the overcrowding at the facility, run by the Corrections Corporation of America for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, subjected immigration violators to health and safety risks. It also alleged the conditions violated due-process rights under the Constitution.

Before the suit was filed in January 2007, the jail was so overcrowded it was "triple celling" hundreds of detainees, the suit alleged. That involved putting three people into cells designed for two, with the third sleeping on the cell floor in a plastic shell or "boat."

The facility housed 1,000 people at one point. After the suit was filed, federal authorities moved out more than 100 inmates, according to the ACLU. According to ICE, the facility now holds no more than 700 people…

Prison overcrowding is forcing the state corrections department to take a new look at rehabilitation of inmates. Now, a pilot program in Otay Mesa offers inmates a chance to get out of prison, and never go back.

Forty-year-old Brian Williams is learning how to repair computer and cable television networks while serving a 16-month sentence at Donovan State Prison in Otay Mesa.

"I could have come to prison and learned to become a better criminal, or through this program learn a skill to be gainfully employed with a new career," Williams said…

At the beginning of the decade, the private prison industry was in a tailspin. After several profitable years in the 1990s, companies contracting prison beds to public corrections agencies were losing revenue at an alarming rate.

Capital earned during the 1990s had been poured into a speculative prison-building boom that backfired. State corrections agencies, a mainstay of what was then a relatively new industry, had begun pulling inmates out. There were too many prison beds and too few prisoners.

[…]

Then, in early 2000, CCA announced a lucrative new contract. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was to house 1,000 detainees at the company's San Diego Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, built as part of the late-1990s construction boom. The agency agreed to pay a per diem fee of $89.50 for every person held…

As immigration laws have become tougher, the federal government has found itself with a logistical challenge: where to house a population that has swollen to more than 30,000 detainees. The solution? Turn them over to the private sector.

Detention contracts have helped turn once-ailing private prison companies into a multibillion-dollar growth industry with record revenues, healthy stock prices and ambitious expansion plans.

One of them, Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, has applied to build a nearly 3,000-bed prison in Otay Mesa, where it now runs a facility holding up to 700 detainees awaiting deportation or decisions on their immigration cases. The company is the nation's largest private prison operator…

Marie Walsh seemed to have it all.

Married with three children, she lived in a prosperous neighborhood outside San Diego where the median value of the homes was $674,000, according to public records.

In the end, however, her life was a California dream. Not even her name was real

The woman who called herself Marie Walsh was really Susan Marie Lefevre, 53, a drug dealer from Saginaw who had been a fugitive for 32 years, law enforcement officials said…

The private prison company that operates a detention center for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Otay Mesa is proposing to build a nearly 3,000-bed mega-prison nearby.

According to county records, Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corporation of America has applied for a permit to build a "secure detention facility" in two phases on a parcel of about 40 acres northwest of Alta and Lonestar roads. A portion of the latter road has yet to be constructed.

The proposed prison would have 2,880 beds and would employ 375 people, according to an application the company filed.

The next time a San Diego sheriff's deputy arrests a man who tries to steal a car, hauls him to a county detention center, starts asking questions and discovers he's in the country illegally, here's what will happen:

The tax-supported district attorney's and public defender's offices will handle his case, a tax-supported judge will preside if it goes to trial, he'll spend an average three weeks in the local jail at $100 each day, a state prison could house him for years at $121 a day, and tax-funded probation officers will follow his progress. Only after that will he be deported.

For years, the White House and border communities such as San Diego have argued over who should pay for all this. As a group of border states yesterday unveiled a report on the costs of incarcerating illegal immigrants linked to crimes, President Bush is again trying to eliminate all federal reimbursement for the task.

A documented gang member and parolee accused of selling marijuana to students at Cal State San Marcos pleaded not guilty Tuesday to five felony drug and weapon charges. Jermaine Sayles, 27, was arrested Friday after a raid by San Diego County sheriff's deputies on an apartment building near the CSUSM campus that was targeted after a tip from school officials about alleged marijuana sales.

Simeon Tomanogi is a suspect in a string of robberies in the Manteca area, and he might still be out there had he not left his ID at a donut store that had been robbed, police said. Manteca police arrested Tomanogi, 39, Monday during a traffic stop. Officers suspected he was in a stolen vehicle. While he was detained, police discovered he was a suspect in a number of robberies that started on February 11.

During a robbery on February 22, after Tomanogi allegedly robbed the Caters Doughnuts store located in the 1100 block W. Yosemite Avenue, he left behind his ID as he was leaving. Tomanogi, 39, is a parolee and a three-strike candidate, police said. He faces charges of two counts of robbery, one count of false imprisonment, possession of a stolen car, and parole violation hold.

A driver being pursued for a traffic violation Sunday night backed his pickup into a deputy's patrol car before speeding off again, authorities said. He surrendered later after deputies identified him from his vehicle registration and telephoned him, said sheriff's Lt. Mike Munsey. The man was on parole, Munsey said.

The deputies were assisting California state parole agents in doing a parole compliance check when they found the money-making operation, sheriff's officials said. They obtained a search warrant and made the seizures and arrests with the assistance of the U.S. Secret Service…