New Jails Won’t End Overcrowding : Only Alternatives to Incarceration Will Do That

Popular belief is that Los Angeles County need only expand its jail system to resolve the current crisis of prisoner overcrowding. This longstanding fallacy, now rejected by the Sheriff’s Department, still finds adherents among criminal-justice professionals. But massive construction of jail facilities would be ineffective, incredibly expensive and foolish.

The problem is monumental. The authorized capacity of the county jail system is 11,800 prisoners, but the current population is hovering at 20,000 and is expected to reach 26,000 by 1990. Crowding at the Central Jail, which is the most populous penal facility in the Western world, has resulted in a federal District Court order imposing a deadline of Nov. 19 for the reduction of the jail’s population from about 8,500 to 6,800.

Since early 1985, by order of the Board of Supervisors, the Countywide Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee, which is made up of all the principal criminal-justice agencies in the county, has been examining remedies to jail overcrowding. Ironically, during that same period the jail system’s population has increased by about 3,000 inmates. What is lacking is the political will to implement the drastic reforms that are required to remedy the situation. This illustrates the first of two maxims on the overcrowding of penal institutions: State and local governments invariably suffer paralysis and wait for a court-imposed solution.

The construction of additional jail beds is not a sensible response--for three reasons:

First, construction only aggravates the problem because expanded correctional systems are inevitably inundated with additional prisoners, and become overcrowded at new levels. This is a result of the second maxim on overcrowding: An abundance of beds in jails and prisons causes criminal-justice systems to depend on incarceration to the exclusion of other options.

Second, construction is absurdly costly. Each new jail bed has a price tag of $75,000; this figure reflects only one-tenth the cost of operation over a 30-year period. Such expenditures represent money foregone by other hard-pressed government services such as education and health care.

Third, jails are an ineffective tool against crime. In 1974 Los Angeles County incarcerated about 0.11% of the population. Today the county incarcerates about 0.25%, yet the crime rate is higher than in 1974 and has recently resumed climbing. Studies suggest that extended incarceration may even heighten the crime rate by increasing recidivism among convicted offenders.

The crime rate is actually more closely connected to other trends such as the economic well-being of the underclasses, the pool of males between ages 18 and 30 and America’s drug epidemic. From 1974 to the present the financial position of those in the lower economic strata deteriorated and the number of young males, who commit a disproportionate number of crimes, grew; consequently, crime increased. The vast majority of crime involves the use, possession or sale of drugs, the theft of property to obtain money to buy drugs and violent acts committed in conjunction with drugs. The criminal-justice system has had little effect on these crimes: Drug usage has increased despite increased enforcement and punishment.

The answer to jail overcrowding lies in exploring alternatives to incarceration. Alternative punishments should focus on labor on public projects, including renovations of our deteriorating infrastructure such as roads, sewers and buildings. Work-furlough, halfway-house and home-detention programs should be expanded to allow suitable offenders to work, seek employment or obtain education during the day, with their freedom restricted only at night. Under such approaches, offenders not only are introduced to constructive behavior but society also gains.

Alternatives to jail should emphasize supervision and treatment, especially for indigent drug abusers. Because of financial cutbacks by federal and state governments, drug programs are overwhelmed by applicants and have waiting lists too long to be an effective option to incarceration.

We must also explore alternatives to pretrial incarceration. About 65% of the prisoners in the Los Angeles County jail system are awaiting trial. Many of them could be released on their own recognizance if investigators were available to obtain reliable information on their backgrounds and contacts in the community. More investigators would be cost-effective, since one investigator would reduce the jail population by about 30 prisoners, whose maintenance costs the county far more than the added investigative expenditures required.

From 1982 through 1985, misdemeanor defendants were allowed to bail out of jail by depositing 10% of their bail in cash. Despite acceptable appearance rates in court, the Legislature took a step backward, allowing the program to expire under pressure from a highly organized bail-bond industry. The result is an increase of about 800 prisoners in the Los Angeles County jail population.

The sad truth is that Americans have a mania for incarceration exceeded in the industrialized world only by the Soviet Union and South Africa. Our obliviousness to the extravagance and ineffectualness of incarceration deprives our criminal-justice system of the ingenuity and progress that we rightfully should expect.