Ups, Downs, Praise, Criticism Torment Rent-a-Jail Business

Business was booming for Glen Cornist just four months ago. Western States Re-Entry Corp., the work-furlough center he operates as a private alternative to San Diego County’s overcrowded jail, had a near-monopoly on referrals from the municipal and superior courts.

The monopoly was broken late in February. A client’s complaints prompted an inquiry into Western States by the county Probation Department and a Superior Court judge. There were no charges pressed or formal findings of wrongdoing. But the courts virtually halted referrals to Cornist and his center.

Instead, judges began sending probationers to Center Court, a competing work-furlough center that opened in January. From no clients at the start of the year, Center Court last week had more than 40, its officials said. At Western States, meantime, the head count has fallen from near 90 in February to 24 last week, Cornist said.

At $500 per head monthly, that’s quite a turnaround. Cornist figures he has lost $120,000 since early in the year. “My business is going down the tubes,” he said forlornly last week.

Welcome to the turbulent world of private corrections.

Non-existent in San Diego only two years ago, private work-furlough centers suddenly have become a significant option for judges sentencing felons convicted of non-violent crimes.

They’ve also become a major hassle, the subject of finger-pointing and recrimination as operators and employees of competing centers trade charges of misconduct and judges try to sort out the facts about an almost wholly unregulated industry.

“We had a market and we had an entrepreneurial response, and government, in its usual fashion, is plodding along and trying to react to the mess it creates,” said Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman.

The market consists of criminals whom judges want to punish without sending them to the county’s jam-packed jails or to state prison. One alternative is work-furlough--programs in which inmates pay for the privilege of being locked up, except for the hours when they are at work.

Some defendants serve local jail time in the county’s own work-furlough program, which houses 125 inmates and will expand to handle 40 to 50 more later this year, according to Vicki Markey, a chief deputy probation officer.

But the wait for a space in the county’s program, now six weeks, at times has been months. And the county will not accept certain groups of criminals, including most sex offenders and drug sellers, or defendants with jobs that are difficult to monitor.

That’s the void filled by private work-furlough centers.

There are three in San Diego County: Western States, the first; Center Court, currently the favored, and Alternative Resources, the newest. Cornist’s wife, Barbara, opened Alternative Resources last month in a building on Imperial Avenue that was abandoned by Western States as its clientele drifted away.

Judges cannot sentence criminals to serve time at the private centers. But defendants who request placement and are judged good risks are ordered to enroll in one of the centers as a condition of being placed on probation.

If defendants break center rules, lose their jobs, commit further offenses or otherwise backslide, their probations can be revoked and the judge who sentenced them can send them to jail or prison.

But nobody has disciplinary power over the work-furlough centers themselves--not the judges, not the Probation Department, not the county sheriff or the state Department of Corrections.

“There is no certification process for these programs, nor is there a government agency that supervises them,” Huffman said. “You get a business license and go.”

Western States’ difficulties, however, have forced officialdom in San Diego County to focus on the lack of regulation.

Huffman conducted a hearing at the end of February, after a Western States inmate complained about sanitation problems at the center and probation officers reported concerns about the program’s management.

“I became very concerned there were not sufficient controls on behalf of the court,” Huffman said. “We were taking too much on faith, and I wanted to make sure we did more to assure the integrity of the process.”

At the hearing, Gerald Williams, chief deputy probation officer for adult services, said “the lack of supervision” at Western States was his staff’s primary criticism. Officers also complained that inadequate exits from the program’s buildings posed a safety problem and that toilet facilities were insufficient. One probation officer reported a resident’s observation of marijuana and cocaine use by inmates.

According to a transcript of the hearing, Glen Cornist told Huffman that most of the criticisms were unfounded. He acknowledged sharing the concerns about the reliability of some residents’ drug tests, but said that and other problems had been resolved by staff changes.

“I did uncover some items that needed some immediate attention, and we gave it our immediate attention,” Cornist said.

Huffman asked the district attorney’s office and the Probation Department to review the situation. Deputy Dist. Atty. Allan Preckel said last week that prosecutors found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. But there were signs of favoritism in Western States’ supervision of probationers, he said.

“What appeared to be happening in some instances was that paying customers were being treated differently, should we say, than non-paying customers,” Preckel said last week. “Human nature being what it is, a transgression on the part of a person who is slow to pay is likely to be reported quicker, it seems to me, than the converse.”

The Probation Department responded in May by tightening its monitoring of defendants housed at the work-furlough centers.

Rather than assign probation officers scattered across the county to handle their cases, a single probation officer was designated as the case officer for all probationers at all three centers.

“The bottom line is you didn’t have the continuity of supervision that was necessary,” Williams said. “We feel having one officer, as opposed to having cases all over the jurisdiction, gives us a better way of exercising . . . oversight.”

Operators of the work-furlough centers applaud the change. Probation Officer Jim Jones has begun visiting the programs and making suggestions about everything from supervision to the value of smoking regulations. The centers are cooperating--knowing that if they don’t, word will get back to the judges on whom they depend for referrals.

But Williams is quick to emphasize that the Probation Department is not in the business of licensing or regulating work-furlough centers.

“The probation officer is not an inspector,” Williams said. “He doesn’t have any inspection powers of these facilities. He is not a regulator of these facilities.”

Further regulation is needed, Williams believes. “Someone needs to assure that health and safety standards are being met,” he said. “Someone needs to assure that fire standards are being met. Someone needs to assure that Cal-OSHA standards are being met.”

Curiously, in an era when most industries want to see regulation stripped away, the center operators support the call for tighter oversight of their businesses.

“If there’s no stopping who you let open this kind of business, you could wipe the whole private work-furlough business out,” Barbara Cornist said, “because if one person screws up, it could make everybody look bad.”

Her husband wants the county to establish standards like those imposed on the alternative custody programs the Cornists run under contracts with the state Department of Corrections. Auditors inspect the contract facilities four times a year, and state officials are in almost daily contact with center operators.

Without clear-cut rules and expectations, Glen Cornist said, an operator cannot know what to do when, as with Western States, his facility falls out of the court’s good graces.

“If you don’t have any guidelines, you could find something wrong with it 24 hours a day,” said Cornist, who has run programs for prisoners and parolees since the early 1970s.

Given the informality of the supervision in San Diego, judges’ attitudes about work-furlough programs may be based more on innuendo than fact.

Privately, some judges say they have been reluctant to use Barbara Cornist’s program because of courthouse rumors about someone thought to be her business partner. But Cornist, who has worked with her husband in the corrections industry for six years, says she cut off dealings with the man after catching word of the judges’ concerns. Judges also say they cannot help but assume that her program is somehow tied to her husband’s, though she says she disagrees with some of her husband’s practices and is in competition with Western States.

In any event, Alternative Resources has gotten only two referrals since opening for business. None of the judges attended an open house where Cornist hoped to show off the $30,000 worth of improvements she put into the building she took over from Western States.

“Everything’s brand new, and I can’t buy a client,” she complained.

Instead, the clients have followed Jerry Day, vice president of Western States until February, to his new post as vice president of Center Court.

Day, a former security guard and carpenter’s union steward, is the work-furlough industry’s top salesman in San Diego.

Since joining Western States in February, 1985, he has plied the halls of the county’s courthouses, explaining the virtues of private work-furlough to judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors and potential clients.

Glen Cornist attributes many of Western States’ problems to Day and says he fired him. Day denies responsibility and says he quit. Day acknowledges that he answered investigators’ questions about Western States after he left the program but insists that he only confirmed information they already had received from other sources.

Judges seem to have demonstrated their confidence in Day by directing most client referrals to whichever program he was working for, despite the fact that he is an uncredentialed newcomer to the criminal justice scene.

“I like to think I established a reputation of being a man of my word,” Day said last week. “What’s more important than having a Ph.D., say, from Harvard is having a Ph.D. from the streets--a Ph.D. in street-smarts.”

Williams and others predict that more private centers will open in San Diego, despite the current difficulties. Judges like having a sentencing option that allows a defendant to keep his job. And, said Municipal Judge H. Ronald Domnitz, they like the certainty of knowing that when they want a criminal punished for a specified period, the private centers will follow their orders.

“The judges are absolutely sick and tired of placing people in custody for 30 days or 60 days, and they turn around and they’re out because of overcrowding” at the County Jail, Domnitz said.

“We realize the private work-furlough places are not perfect by any means. But at least we’re sure we can inconvenience people for 30, 60, 90 days with some modicum of control.”