San Diego County Faces Housing Extra Inmates
Buried among statewide budget-cutting plans is a relatively short paragraph. The gist: Instead of sending low-level felons to prison, keep them in county jails. Story in the North County Times.
The size and placement of the idea —- a few lines in the middle of a 34-page summary of new budget-slashing ideas —- belies the significance of how big a change it would be.
It’s a plan that could see the lowest-level criminals released from local jails to make room for a larger crowd of felons, about 2,100 a year.
“It’s going to be a severe problem,” San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said at a public safety forum in June.
Here’s how it works now: Criminals sentenced to less than a year in custody stay in a local jail, while those who get longer sentences are sent to state prison.
Here’s the way it would work under the change: Certain criminals with a sentence of three years or less stay put in county jail.
People who violate their parole, something that normally would draw prison time, also would stay local. Felons who might be housed locally would include those whose crimes are not serious or violent. Sex offenders would still be sent to state prison.
The daily population of San Diego County’s jails on Friday hovered below 4,700 people. The local jails can hold about 5,500 people —- but no more than that, the courts have ordered.
The proposal is part of the state’s budget package under negotiations in Sacramento.
If the budget passes as proposed, with this plan still in it, the county jails would house hundreds more felons each year.
‘Creative alternatives’ to jail
In 2009, San Diego County sent 1,428 people to prison for nonviolent, non-sex offense crimes, as well as 715 people who violated parole, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs the state’s prisons.On the surface, those 2,100 or so inmates appear to fit the criteria for prisoners who would avoid prison and stay in local jails under the plan. And those are the sort of numbers that would leave local jails jammed to capacity inside of just a few months, Gore said.
“It’s going to force (the Sheriff’s Department) to come up with some creative alternatives to incarceration,” Gore said at the forum. “We are exploring a lot of different areas.”
Among the ideas, he said, is the possibility of GPS monitoring or house arrest. San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said at the forum that the plan brings some challenges.
“It’s shifting the burden to the local taxpayers and the local county,” Dumanis said.
Under the plan, the state could save $243.8 million this fiscal year if certain prisoners stay in county jails. The proposal was part of suggestions laid out by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in May when it updated the proposed state budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year.
Even though the fiscal year started Thursday, the budget talks are still under way in Sacramento. Among those at the table is Assembly Republican leader Martin Garrick, R-Carlsbad. His spokesman, Seth Unger, said Friday that the proposal to shift more criminals to local jails “is part of the ongoing discussions” in closing a $19 billion budget gap.
“Republicans want to make sure that anything done with inmates and shifting responsibility locally (to county jails) is done in collaboration with counties and sheriffs across the state,” Unger said, adding that such talks would include a look at the concerns of overcrowding the jails.
“We do not want to see inmates being granted early release due to a new housing arrangement with the state. But we do believe that there could be a cost savings we need to explore,” Unger said.
Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, said the state has been looking at ways to reduce prison populations for years, but she said this proposal is “impractical” and “unlikely to be accepted by the local counties because of the expenses involved.”
“It is not likely to happen,” Kehoe said.
A number of law enforcement groups, including the California Peace Officers Association, the California Police Chiefs Association and the California State Sheriffs Association, all asked that the proposal as shaped be taken off the table.
Easing overcrowded prisons has been a high priority in California in recent years, and officials have taken a number of steps toward that end. Another plan on the table is part of Chelsea’s Law, named for slain Poway teen Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February by registered sex offender John Albert Gardner III, who confessed to the crimes.
Among the provisions of Chelsea’s Law, which is working its way through the Legislature, is a plan to recategorize certain felonies, such as petty theft, as misdemeanors.
The idea behind that is to open up prison beds by keeping small-timer thieves in county jails —- thus freeing up money to better monitor sex offenders.
Funding problems
It’s unclear how much money the county would get from the state to house additional inmates each year.One suggestion is to raise vehicle license fees —- the cost to register a car —- to pay for the shift in housing. Aside from housing, the proposal says the state would give the county about $11,500 per prisoner shipped back to local custody.
It appears the money would not go to the Sheriff’s Department for housing. Instead, it probably would go to probation departments to pay for programming to address education, employment and other problem areas for people who find themselves in trouble with the law.
The money would also help fund drug courts and “alternative custody,” the proposal states.
In San Diego County, the Sheriff’s Department and the Probation Department have separate budgets. Mack Jenkins is chief of the county’s Probation Department, and he said the proposal is “a big deal” that “has been on our radar” since it was announced.
The county Probation Department monitors low-level criminals after their release from jail. The role of monitoring people released from prison falls to state parole officers. But if the would-be state prisoners are moved to county jails, that means more people for county probation officers to monitor.
“We are really concerned about the workload impact,” Jenkins said last week. “I don’t have numbers yet, I haven’t seen how many offenders we are talking about, but already, we don’t have enough probation officers to supervise everybody on probation.”
His department has only 78 officers to keep tabs on the approximately 14,000 people on probation. As it is, not everybody gets a close eye. The department pays most attention to the 2,100 people determined to be at highest risk to commit new crimes.
Jenkins said the proposed $11,500 per inmate probably is not nearly enough to cover the cost of providing effective programming and the cost of paying for probation officers to monitor former inmates.
The idea of shifting state prisoners to county jails, he said, is not surprising. He said it could work —- if there is enough money to cover housing and programming costs.
That, Jenkins said, is because a well-funded probation department can provide employment assistance, substance abuse treatment and address other problems for low-level criminals before they commit a crime serious enough to land them in prison.
“If you fund probation upfront, you can adequately reduce the prison population over time,” Jenkins said. “We can increase the success rate (for low-level offenders) and thus reduce the prison population and reserve the prison beds for the most dangerous criminals.”
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