Bernard Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas offer their solutions for overcrowded jails, gang violence and homelessness

The Times is asking the two major candidates competing to succeed Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke about some key issues in the 2nd District, which stretches from Mar Vista through South Los Angeles and into Compton and Carson.

Today, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard C. Parks and state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) offer their ideas for addressing jail overcrowding, gangs and the homeless.

Between now and the June 3 election, the candidates will discuss other issues in this series of occasional articles.

What are your ideas for alleviating the overcrowding at county jail facilities that has contributed to violence there and prompted the early release of inmates?

Parks: In order to evaluate jail overcrowding properly you must look at four populations within the county jail system:

* State prisoners being held awaiting transfer to state institutions as witnesses or suspects in pending trials or hearings;

* County jail inmates awaiting immigration hearings;

* County jail inmates awaiting trial as suspects in a crime;

* County jail inmates serving a court-imposed sentence for misdemeanor crime violations that occurred in Los Angeles County.

State prisoner transfers and immigration hearings should be expedited so that space can be freed up as rapidly as possible, but at minimum the county should be paid for the cell space provided to both state or federal jurisdictions for sentenced prisoners or detainees awaiting immigration hearings. This freed up space would then allow the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to concentrate on its primary mission of providing a secure, humane and safe environment for inmates awaiting trial and those serving time for misdemeanor sentences. There is little doubt that the inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff violence in the seven county jail facilities are functions of many factors and overcrowding of the inmate population is certainly one of them. Over the last 15 years, the growth in the average annual number of inmates has outpaced the number of beds available for them, forcing the sheriff to institute an early release program to comply with court mandated decrees.

The sheriff has taken great strides, however, since the mis-match of beds to population reached a critical stage in 2004 when inmates slept on makeshift cots and mattresses on the floor. Just in the last few months, we have seen an easing of overcrowded conditions by virtue of the reopening of the Pitchess Detention Center’s south facility. Improvements at that facility increased the total jail capacity by over 1,000 beds, with a resulting 10% increase in the average length of time served by inmates.

The sheriff has proposed, and I support, a $523-million capital budget to further expand and improve facilities at the Men’s Central Jail, the Pitchess Detention Center and the Sybil Brand Institute. These improvements will reduce overcrowding throughout the jail system, further reducing the potential for inmate violence, the necessity for early release and most importantly to comply with the court mandated decree.

Beyond simply assuring that the jail facilities are physically adequate to house the inmate population, we must also acknowledge that incarceration in many cases represents a failure of many other social systems. We must consciously try to keep people out of jail in the first place, address their needs and addictions while incarcerated and keep them from coming back once they leave. Those steps include prevention, intervention, education and youth development at the front end, services and treatment while incarcerated and rehabilitation, literacy training and job placement to minimize recidivism at the back end.

As a society, we have invested disproportionately more in the jail system than we have in programs, especially for young people, to prevent and dissuade criminal behavior that leads to jail and from jail to state prison. As chair of the city’s Budget and Finance Committee, I have implemented a budget policy that set a goal of at least 15% of what is spent on the Los Angeles Police Department budget be spent on crime prevention/intervention activities, an objective I will seek with respect to the Los Angeles County budget.

Ridley-Thomas: To reduce crime and make our communities and neighborhoods safe, we have no choice but to put criminals who put us at risk behind bars – particularly violent offenders and sexual predators. But we cannot solve all of our public safety problems by having a one-dimensional “lock ‘em up” approach.

Arrest and incarceration will always play a major role in our efforts to reduce crime and violence, but those actions cannot be our sole strategies for promoting and maintaining the level of community public safety we all expect, deserve and desire.

Local crime suppression efforts must deal with people who constitute the worst threats to our lives and neighborhood quality of life. But we must have effective crime prevention, intervention and rehabilitation programs that steer people away from crime and lower the recidivism rate in L.A. County.

We are not going to reach every potential high-risk offender in L.A. County through prevention or intervention programs, so expanding our county’s jail system is a necessity.

That is why I joined with Sheriff Lee Baca to support revising the formula for allocating funds under AB 900, a state prison and jail construction funds measure written by Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana).

The state jail funding formula developed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation treats L.A. County unfairly by giving more jail funds to small counties and less to larger counties.

L.A. County has been losing out on jail construction funds. We need to capture a larger share of those funds to expand our jail system. I will continue my push for the state jail funds that L.A. County deserves.

We must work effectively to streamline the judicial pretrial process – without compromising anyone’s rights to due process – to lower the duration of jail detention periods. If we fail in that effort, we can build all of the jail space we want and it still won’t be enough.

I will work with our Superior Courts on proposed streamlining strategies. I support state funding for more judges to reduce our backlog of criminal court cases. I also support state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata’s (D-Oakland) $5-billion court construction bond measure to make our courts safer for judges, law enforcement and the public.

We need to examine our inmate population more closely. We must stop treating our jails as homeless shelters. We must do a far better job of properly identifying and treating those people with mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders that represent a sizable number of jail inmates and a substantial number of our jail system’s repeat offenders.

We must work collaboratively with law enforcement and the courts to increase the number and scope of diversion programs available to nonviolent offenders who pose minimal risks to public safety as determined by county probation officers assessing their individual cases.

We must make the best use of house arrest or home detention sentencing options, and use electronic monitoring to lessen the growing inmate load on our jails and preserve crowded cell space for violent criminals and people awaiting trial who have been accused of committing violent crimes.

If we use home detention and electronic monitoring wisely, jail overcrowding and early inmate release triggered by inmate overcrowding can be lessened in a sensible manner that does not put our communities at greater risk of rising crime and violence.

Lastly, we need to convince Californians that now is time to reform our state’s three-strikes law. I supported Proposition 66 in 2004, which would have modified the three-strikes law to require the third strike to be for a serious or violent crime. I remain interested in efforts to limit the scope of the third strike to violent felonies. The law, in its current form, has contributed to the dramatic rise in state prison and county jail overcrowding, but it fails to adequately reduce violent crimes.

We should also resist the growing temptation to pass so-called anti-crime ballot measures that do little or nothing to stop crime and violence, but exponentially increase our costs to implement them.

The county spends more than $100 million each year on gang suppression, intervention and prevention programs. What is your assessment of the county’s efforts? How should the effectiveness of these programs be measured?

Parks: There are 1,000 street gangs and 80,000 gang members in the county, and many of them live in the 2nd District. Gang-related homicide is the leading cause of death for all people age 15 through 44 in the county, a shocking statistic that speaks to the insidious nature of gang violence.

Countless gang-related programs exist, with results that are mixed or difficult to quantify. The core issues that are evident in areas of high crime and violence are: poverty, low educational achievement, lack of jobs, lack of health services, lack of adequate housing, lack of adult participation and lack of recreational facilities and activities.

These core issues can no longer be overlooked as solutions are sought. They must be incorporated into current and future planning efforts. Additionally, there has been an over-reliance on enforcement and incarceration strategies, local versus regional strategies and incremental and symptom-driven plans versus holistic approaches. In my 38 years of law enforcement experience I have watched the debate between enforcement versus rehabilitation rage for years. It is apparent to me that the only well thought out strategy is creating a full spectrum approach to social justice, which includes prevention, intervention, education, enforcement, prosecution, incarceration and rehabilitation with adequate funding and evaluation for each segment and an insistence that these complex issues be addressed jointly and in a comprehensive manner. Of most importance, particularly for our younger population, is youth development.

Although I have seen many programs with various levels of success, there are two that I would support as examples of regional multidiscipline efforts that are worthy of expansion and future funding.

One is the Community Law Enforcement and Recovery (CLEAR) program. The other is a program begun by the county’s Community Development Commission labeled the Florence-Firestone Community Enhancement Team.

The effectiveness of each can be measured by tangible results:

CLEAR is a regional partnership between the county and city of Los Angeles specifically designed to combat community quality of life issues, including gang violence. In the CLEAR model, the LAPD and sheriff address visible gang activity in target neighborhoods; the city attorney and the county district attorney issue gang injunctions and vigorously prosecute criminal activity and quality of life issues; probation officers work to ensure that convicted criminals receive appropriate conditions of probation; and a Community Impact Team works together on local strategies to facilitate neighborhood recovery, cleanup, code enforcement and quality of life issues.

In neighborhoods where CLEAR has been deployed, all crime, but specifically gang-related violent crime, has been reduced significantly. CLEAR is a success story that speaks to the effectiveness of inter-agency and inter-jurisdictional collaboration of the city of Los Angeles and the county. Given the fact that there are four other cities with their own police departments and 20 unincorporated areas in the 2nd District, the CLEAR model should be expanded throughout the 2nd District, and throughout the county for that matter.

The second program reflects a philosophy, which I share, that all public services should be viewed as instruments to assure safe neighborhoods within safe communities within safe cities within a safe county. There are 18 county departments whose services impact the public safety environment. These departments include the Sheriff’s Department, Child Support Services, Parks and Recreation, Public Health, Community and Senior Services, Public Works and Mental Health. The provision of one service must be integrated with the others. Put another way, a single public service, such as Parks and Recreation, cannot be performed as if it bears no relation to another, such as Community and Senior Services or Children and Family Services.

A very good example of this philosophy in action, specifically as it applies to gang activities, exists in the Florence-Firestone community, one of the roughest and most blighted areas in the region. Crime has dropped in the area over the last two years because the community and multiple county services combined their efforts to make it happen.

The county’s Community Development Commission sought out community organizers to help inform residents of services available to them. Once that education process started, residents began demanding services like code enforcement, street improvements, graffiti abatement and cleanup and elimination of illegal dumping. Through the Regional Planning Commission, they closed down an illegal vehicle paint shop near an elementary school. Block Watch programs were organized. They closed down an illegal nightclub, eliminating the crime activity associated with it.

Then they met with the Sheriff’s Department and joined forces in reporting and fighting criminal activity. Two hundred residents have gone through the sheriff’s Community Academy. They asked for and received a special prosecutor from the district attorney’s office to try neighborhood homicide cases.

The impact of this community involvement complemented by various county services has been spectacular. Homicides are down by half and over 100 members of a local “targeted street gang” have been indicted. Retail stores, including a Target, have moved into the area, as have new restaurants. In next year’s budget, the sheriff is adding another deputy to the Florence-Firestone Community Enhancement Team, further institutionalizing the progress that has been made.

As a supervisor, this is exactly the kind of partnering I will promote and enable between our various communities and the county departments whose services in combination with community activism make for safer environments.

Ridley-Thomas: We must involve communities in strategic ways to engage youth – at an early age – to convince them, in the most persuasive ways possible, that walking down a path of committing petty offenses to major crimes will only lead them to jail terms and the loss of what could have been a promising future.

Funds for local prevention, intervention and rehabilitation programs are a critical concern. I applaud California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass’ efforts to reform the state’s budget process and her willingness to consider new revenue sources to balance the state budget. We cannot continue to pass state budgets that shift all the state’s fiscal problems on to counties and cities.

When you spend $100 million per year on gang programs, there is an expectation that there will be measurable progress in reducing the level of gang violence. But I do not believe anyone in our county feels we are getting the best return on our anti-gang suppression, intervention and prevention investment.

According to CAL/GANG, a database maintained by the California Department of Justice, L.A. County has as many as 1,000 criminal street gangs and in excess of 85,000 gang members.

While these numbers may be inflated, by any measure there are far too many members of criminal gangs. It is clear we must have a comprehensive approach for dealing with gangs and confronting unlawful gang activity in our communities. We must also work diligently to keep our next generation of young people out of criminal gangs altogether.

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice produced a report for the Advancement Project that serves as an excellent action plan for what is needed on gangs. Her report recommends a wrap-around approach that involves law enforcement, probation officers, school administrators, teachers, social service workers and community residents as key role players in comprehensive gang prevention and intervention strategy.

We must move quickly to implement the recommendations in the Advancement Project’s gang report, with all levels of government – federal, state, county and city – playing appropriate roles and dedicating adequate resources to this critical task.

In many communities, residents feel under siege and helpless to stop the escalating violence around them. If there is a concerted effort to involve and include residents in planning and implementing anti-gang strategies, they will support an approach that empowers them to bring about meaningful change in their neighborhoods that delivers results.

Rising incidents of interracial gang violence highlight an extremely troubling development that must be addressed by our entire community before its impact spreads to areas of county life presently untouched by gang activity.

As a member of the L.A. City Council, I worked to develop the Gang Intervention Certification Program in cooperation with the Pat Brown Institute and Cal State L.A.

We enrolled former gang members in an intensive course of study to learn effective tools and strategies to work as peacemakers, facilitators and intervention specialists in community outreach efforts to work with young African American and Latino gang members. Their standout work continues to this day. We must push for more of this kind of effort.

I will work with community stakeholders – law enforcement, businesses, labor, social service providers, former gang members and faith-based organizations – to develop a cooperative, multi-jurisdictional strategy for addressing gangs and gang activity in our neighborhoods.

We must take into consideration the need to provide health services, mental health treatment, job and workforce training, and educational intervention programs that focus directly on the social and economic reasons that lead young people in our communities to join gangs.

We must provide youth who are enticed by gang life with viable alternatives to that lifestyle and put them on a path that will take them from middle school to high school graduation, and then to college or career education.

We must have a targeted “wrap-around system of care” for adjudicated youth to reduce recidivism rates.

When I am elected, I will appoint a deputy for Public Safety & Gang Intervention who will be assigned to work in partnership with officials in cities and residents in unincorporated areas in the 2nd District to develop public safety plans tailored to their specific community needs.

The measurement of the effectiveness of these plans and programs will be based on standards set by the communities themselves.

I will work with Sheriff Lee Baca and his department to stop undocumented gun sales between private parties to prevent people with “clean” records from buying guns for people with criminal records. This practice contributes to the accessibility of illegal firearms and ultimately leads to more gun violence.

Efforts have stalled to create a new center to aid the 2nd District’s estimated 16,000 homeless people, at least in part because of a dispute over its location. How would you resolve this situation, and what area of the district would be the most appropriate site?

Parks: The 2nd District leads the county in residents that are homeless, receive Section 8 housing vouchers and live in unauthorized housing. These are significant indications that the housing crisis, the number of homeless and near-homeless people has reached a critical mass. It is also apparent that the homeless population has six sub-categories that need to be addressed so that core solutions can be addressed. They are:

* The mentally ill;

* Those addicted to alcohol or drugs;

* Those who suffer from illiteracy;

* The unemployed or unemployable;

* Returning convicts from state prison; and

* Those that prey on the above.

Adopted in 2006, the county’s Homeless Prevention Initiative was intended to establish “Stabilization Centers” in each of the five supervisorial districts. That objective has not succeeded, mainly because of the opposition of many communities to the placement of such centers within their boundaries.

Thanks to the efforts of the Los Angeles City Council, the 2nd District already has what amounts to a functioning stabilization center in the form of New Image on Broadway Place. Established in 2003, New Image provides 600 beds and has moved more than 3,000 people to transitional or permanent housing.

Also located in the 2nd District and operated by New Image, Project Fresh Start provides 50 beds for women and combines housing placement with job training, computer education, life skills and mental health and health care. Project Fresh Start is an amazing story for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it is located in what used to be a nuisance motel in a blighted area traversed by prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers. Project Fresh Start has transformed the entire community around it. New Image took a negative and turned it into a project that saves lives, all the while enhancing the neighborhood environment around it.

As a council member, I supported funding for both projects, have visited both facilities and have seen the remarkable results they produce. In my view, it makes little sense to continue centralizing homeless services in downtown Los Angeles particularly when it has been well documented that homelessness is a countywide issue. Also, it is not wise to pursue a super-sized “stabilization center” when successful models like New Image and Project Fresh Start already exist and could work quite effectively though out the 2nd District and would assist with community buy-in and site placement elsewhere in the district.

The key factors to success are:

* Concentration of services on the core populations;

* Decentralized placement sites;

* Services to address co-dependencies;

* Services that address transitional model versus a warehousing model;

* Smaller facilities; and

* Community support for site placement and integration into permanent housing and employment status.

Ridley-Thomas: Homelessness is an economic, healthcare and moral issue that I have addressed while serving as a member of the state Proposition 63 Mental Health Oversight Commission. The commission allocates funds collected by the Mental Health Services Act to support county-based homeless community outreach facilities, mental health treatment, chronic and acute health services and mental health counseling.

During my tenure on the commission, I have fought to ensure that Los Angeles County receives its fair share of Proposition 63 funds for projects to expand mental health treatment and intervention programs; finance low-cost, affordable housing; and create additional homeless shelter beds.

As chair of Days of Dialogue, a nonprofit organization that brings together a diverse array of leaders and community residents for dialogues on major issues affecting our community, I brought focused community attention to the issue of mental health and its connection to homelessness in our communities. Mental health advocates, religious leaders, homeless service providers, L.A. city and county officials and civic and business leaders participated in that important discussion. We will hold more dialogues on the subject of mental health and homelessness to keep those topics at the top of the public agenda.

One thing is certain: County jail is neither a homeless shelter nor a substitute for community-based affordable housing and services.

Every district in L.A. County needs permanent supportive solutions that enable homeless individuals and families to move from a life on the street or a temporary encampment to stable housing where they can receive health services, mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, job assistance and a transition to a permanent affordable housing environment.

Homeless residents in the 2nd District should not be forced to look north to skid row and its homeless services in downtown Los Angeles as their only hope for survival. Health service providers who may want to pass off their obligation to provide care to someone who is homeless should not dump their responsibilities on skid row.

Solving the homeless situation for tens of thousands of people in the 2nd District will take a full-out community engagement to achieve a compassionate solution. Community residents must be included and involved in the decision-making process.

Residents and other community stakeholders need to have input on the scope of community-based homeless assistance that is proposed for development and, through discussion and dialogue, reach a community consensus on where homeless assistance is best located.

The county’s need for affordable housing is great. We must do everything within our power to promote affordable housing construction, particularly in this time of sustained economic downturn, rising rental housing costs and soaring home foreclosures that are pushing many working families in L.A. County to the brink of homelessness.