Orange County Approves House Arrests to Relieve Jail Crowding

The Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a test program under which some inmates will be transferred from the overcrowded County Jail to their homes where electronic monitors will be used to make sure that they stay there.

County officials said the program, which could begin in November, will cost an estimated $116,772 for one year and include 25 inmates at the start.

Convicts allowed to spend their nights at home will wear wristlets that they will insert into verifier boxes in answer to computer-generated telephone calls made randomly to participants’ houses to confirm that they are there. Probation Department workers also will make unannounced visits.

Inmates in the county’s work-furlough program who continue to hold their usual jobs while spending nights in the jail will be eligible for at-home incarceration. The program will be restricted to convicts who are not drug abusers, violent or a serious threat to the community and who follow jail rules.

A county report said inmates must have served half of their sentences and still have 30 days or more left to serve in order to be eligible for the program. They also will have to be residents of the county, have telephones at home and be working full time.

Supervisors have been looking for methods to ease overcrowding in the main men’s jail in Santa Ana since last year when a federal judge found them and the sheriff in contempt for not complying with the judge’s 1978 order to improve inmate conditions.

In the last year the county has expanded its branch jails and refused to accept prisoners picked up for public drunkenness in an attempt to reduce the overcrowding.