The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has proposed building more jails to ease overcrowding across the county. It plans to build a women's jail at Pitchess Detention Center that would accommodate 1,100 inmates. Additionally, the 49-year-old Men's Central Jail housing about 5,000 inmates will be dismantled to make room for three towers, according to the Sheriff's office.

The county Board of Supervisors approved an application Tuesday for $100 million in state funding for the women's jail. The total budget is more than a billion dollars.

L.A. County jails are at capacity with approximately 15,000 inmates, 20 percent of which are minor offenders, according to Sheriff's Dept. spokesman Steve Whitmore.

"The larger the number of people in the jail, the more vulnerable the jail inmate is going to feel. The less [the inmate] can do, the more anxious [the inmate] will be," said Franklin Zimring, a University of California, Berkeley law professor.

"What crowding does is make a restriction on liberty and also [the jail] into a potentially threatening environment," he said.

Zimring said that following a prison realignment order, county jails have to make hard choices about which members of the existing population should be released to make room for new inmates.

About 1,800 state prisoners have been moved to L.A. county jails since the realignment.

"We haven't seen an increased number in our overall population because as they come, others are released," Whitmore said.

Prison realignment went into effect Oct. 1 last year, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision to reduce overcrowding in the state prison system. Under realignment, minor offenders, or those convicted of nonviolent and non-sexual crimes, will serve their sentences in county jails instead of prisons.

Whitmore said the Sheriff's Department is working on legislation for an electronic monitoring program. Low-security inmates chosen for the program would be released into home detention and monitored by ankle bracelets.

If the program is approved, as many as 1,000 inmates will be released.

Reach Staff Reporter Gracie Zheng here.