L.A. Court Tops Federal Survey for Putting Felons Behind Bars

Eighty-eight percent of felons sentenced in 1983 by judges in Los Angeles Superior Court’s Central District were required to serve at least some time in either jail or state prison, according to a just-released study conducted for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The local incarceration rate was the highest of the 18 largely urban jurisdictions in the 1983 study. The average incarceration rate was 71%. Denver, with 42%, was the lowest.

Ten percent of the Los Angeles cases, the lowest percentage among the jurisdictions, resulted only in probation. The jurisdictions together sentenced 28% of defendants to such terms. The rest--2% in Los Angeles and 1% in all--were fined or sentenced to make restitution to their victims.

The only other California jurisdiction included in the study was Riverside County, where 57% of defendants were incarcerated and 43% received only probation.

Goal: Basic Information

The study included a total of 15,000 cases in county or city court systems in 15 states, all of them urban areas ranging in size from Philadelphia and Baltimore to Toledo, Ohio, and Lincoln, Neb. It was conducted by Mark A. Cuniff, executive director of the National Assn. of Criminal Justice Planners.

Cuniff said the study’s purpose was not “to argue the merits of one sentencing approach over another” but to provide basic information about sentencing practices.

The study was the latest in a series carried out for the U.S. Justice Department’s information-gathering Bureau of Justice Statistics to give law enforcement policy makers insights into criminal sentencing procedures in states and localities.

“From this study . . . we know more precisely the kinds of sentences that convicted felons receive and some of the factors that influence judges when they decide whether to send an offender to prison and for how long,” said Steven R. Schlesinger, the bureau’s director.

“Until recently, one of the big gaps in our criminal justice data has been the lack of reliable information about felony sentences,” he said.

In a memorandum accompanying the study, Jerry Timmons of the Los Angeles Countywide Justice Coordination Committee, which oversaw local participation, said the new federal data “on the extensive use of jail incarceration in Los Angeles County are particularly significant.”

Forty-four percent of the incarcerated Los Angeles defendants were sentenced to jail, nearly always along with probation, and 44% were sentenced to state prison, compared to 26% getting jail sentences and 45% getting prison terms in the entire study.

‘High-Risk Gamble’

Timmons indicated that the new study tends to challenge last February’s Rand Corp. report on felony probation, which he said “seemed to imply that serious offenders are being granted probation routinely but downplayed the significance of jail as a condition of probation.”

The Rand Corp. report concluded that probation, originally used primarily as a rehabilitative tool for petty criminals, has been used in California in recent years as “a high-risk gamble” to punish felons who can be serious threats to public safety.

It tracked 1,672 male felons who had been placed on probation by courts in Los Angeles and Alameda counties. The researchers found that 65% of them were arrested and 51% convicted of new crimes during the usual 40-month probationary term.

The new federal study covered sentences for specific serious crimes: homicide (including the various degrees of murder and manslaughter), rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft or larceny and drug trafficking.

In Los Angeles’ Central District--essentially the city of Los Angeles, except for the San Fernando Valley--5% of the sentences were for homicide, 3% for rape, 20% for robbery, 12% for assault, 19% for burglary, 10% for theft and 31% for drug trafficking.

The report indicated that, except for drug trafficking, the percentages of the various crimes were similar in all of the jurisdictions studied. In that crime category, it noted that “within Los Angeles, the percentage of cases involving drug trafficking is twice that of the overall average, 31% versus 15%. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Philadelphia shows only 3% of its cases dealing with drug trafficking.”

The report showed that “there was great consistency in how sentence lengths were ordered” within the individual jurisdictions. In 15 of the 18 jurisdictions, for example, rape sentences were longer than robbery sentences. In 14, aggravated assault sentences exceeded the average length of burglary sentences.

There were “substantial variations” between jurisdictions on the average prison sentences meted out. Average sentences for aggravated assault, for example, varied from 3.7 years to 14.4 years depending on where the convict was sentenced.

The import of comparisons between jurisdictions was mitigated by the fact that five, including Los Angeles, use at least some determinate sentences, prescribed by law and not subject to review. The rest use indeterminate sentences, in which the court-imposed penalty is reviewed, usually by a parole board.

The study noted that penalties in states using determinant sentencing are generally shorter than those in states using indeterminate sentencing. “Undoubtedly, the certainty associated with a determinate sentencing scheme is the major reason for this difference in approach,” the study said.

California uses determinate sentences except in homicide cases, where indeterminate sentences of 25 years to life can be imposed for first-degree murder, with parole eligibility commencing at 16.8 years.

The study showed that in homicide sentencing, the average term for all jurisdictions was 14.9 years; in Los Angeles it was 6.5 years. The study did not include life terms or death sentences in its computation of average terms. Twenty-six percent of homicide sentences covered in the study were for life in prison or death. Twelve death sentences were ordered in the 15,000 cases studied, all of them for homicide.

Average state prison terms given in Los Angeles Superior Court for other crimes, compared to average terms for the other 17 jurisdictions, were:

Rape, 11.5 years in Los Angeles, 12.6 years in others; robbery, 3.8 and 8.7; assault, 5.2 and 6.7; burglary, 2.5 and 4.6; theft, 2.1 and 3.3; drug trafficking, 2.6 and 4.2.