County Seeks Ways to Release Inmates

Facing a court order to reduce overcrowding in Orange County Jail, county probation officials said Tuesday they are studying new programs that would place many inmates on work-furlough status and allow others to leave jail as early as 60 days before their sentences are completed.

The programs, to be presented to a county legal advisory committee during the next few weeks, represent Orange County’s first major step toward providing a number of alternatives to full jail sentences for convicted offenders. The proposals promise to stir up controversy in what has always been a law-and-order county, since some would release prisoners before they have served their full sentences.

Michael Schumacher, the chief probation officer, said Tuesday that the contempt citation a federal judge issued the county this week for overcrowded conditions in its jail means the county will have to act soon to divert from the jail those inmates whose crimes were least serious.

“Obviously, with what’s occurred now with the federal court, something has to be done,” he said.

Among the alternatives under study are parole programs that would, like state and federal corrections programs, allow some prisoners to be released early on probation, expand pretrial releases to allow some prisoners who do not qualify for or cannot pay bail to be released under supervision, expand work-furlough, diversion and halfway-house programs for alcohol-related cases, and institute home detention, to allow some offenders to serve the last part of their sentences at home.

Probation officials in January began an aggressive new employment program for prisoners. It goes a step further than the work-furlough program, under which some inmates serving short sentences can keep their old jobs while serving their jail time at night.

Under the new work-furlough arrangement, a prisoner nearing the end of a longer sentence can be released to take on a new, temporary job, in preparation for re-entering the work force. The first employer contract was signed with STS Graphics, in Anaheim, where as many as five prisoners at a time now help make Ocean Pacific T-shirts for the minimum wage.

Orange County in recent years has compared poorly with other counties, in terms of alternatives to jail time for less serious offenses. When the county applied for state jail bond money to build a new processing center near the main jail, state officials gave the county relatively low marks for its lack of incarceration alternatives, particularly the lack of any parole or early-release program.

The state Board of Corrections found that 43% of those awaiting trial in Orange County Jail were charged with misdemeanors, one of the highest percentages in the state.

Law-and-Order Image

“Orange County’s image as a tough law-and-order county was, apparently, a hindrance when the evaluative committee began the analysis of how severely overcrowded each county’s facilities were,” Supervisor Harriett Wieder conceded in a letter to Gov. George Deukmejian last year.

But she argued, “In our opinion, the people of Orange County and the state of California supported (the state jail bond issue) for the very purpose of making our communities safer by incarcerating society’s predators.”

Board of Supervisors’ Chairman Thomas F. Riley said this week that many Orange County judges still hold the view that people sentenced to jail should remain there for their full jail term--a hindrance to adopting many early-release programs that are used in other counties.

“I personally am willing to congratulate the Orange County courts,” he added. “The kind of constituency that is in Orange County demands that those sentences be stiff, and that those sentences be carried out.”

Superior Court Judge Richard Beacom, presiding judge of the court last year, said one problem with parole and pretrial release programs is the increasing number of serious offenses being brought before judges in recent years.

Cases Are More Serious

“There used to be a lot of low-grade (bad) check cases, car theft cases and grand theft cases, and, percentage-wise, we’re seeing more homicides, more rapes, aggravated assaults, robberies and serious narcotics sales,” he explained.

Many of the programs would be suitable in less serious crimes, but there are fewer such cases going through the courts, he said.

“You kind of have two opposing forces on the thing,” Beacom added. “You’ve got the public on the one hand, crying for longer, stiffer sentences, and then, on the other hand, you’ve got this population explosion, with limited facilities to handle the prisoners and a reluctance on the part of the public that wants to lock ‘em up to provide facilities to bed them.”

Schumacher said judges have a valid point in wanting inmates to serve their full sentences, when in most cases that sentence has been determined to be the minimum appropriate penalty for the offense. “But one of the counter-arguments is, we’re so badly overcrowded that some things need to be done with the lighter-weight offenders,” he said.

Survey on Alternatives

Fourth District Supervisor Ralph Clark recently surveyed his north-central county constituency on solutions to the jail crowding problem. Alternatives to incarceration, such as probation, halfway houses and home detention, were supported by 27% of those polled, while 24% favored using city jails whenever possible, 22% favored construction of one very large county jail, and 19% favored building a number of jails throughout the county.

Still, county officials do not expect that the proposed programs will have a major effect on overcrowding at the main jail. A recent study found that if all sentenced inmates spent the last quarter of their sentences at home, the population of the main jail would be reduced by 178 inmates.