Lawsuit Pits Rivals in Work-Furlough Sector

As jailers struggle to manage San Diego County’s largest inmate population ever, turmoil continues to grip the private work-furlough industry, designed to offer a low-cost alternative to overcrowded jails.

The operator of Alternative Resources, a Southeast San Diego work-furlough center, filed a lawsuit Monday in San Diego Superior Court against Jerry Day, who has worked for several furlough programs in the county at one time or another, bringing clients to whichever program employed him.

The suit, filed by program operator Barbara Cornist, alleges that Day, who was briefly employed by Alternative Resources last month, broke a written contract by quitting and starting his own work-furlough center in East San Diego. It seeks a court order shutting down Day’s program, Work-Release Center of California, and more than $1.2 million in damages.

The dispute is only the latest of several controversies that have rocked the tiny but growing private corrections business in San Diego.

Judges use the programs as an alternative to jail for nonviolent criminals. The offenders pay for their supervised residence in the centers and are allowed out only to go to work. The centers are not regulated by local or state authorities, but the county Probation Department monitors the offenders’ progress and reports to the judges on the programs’ performance.

Their promoters say work-furlough centers can act as a relief valve for the county’s crowded jails, which have housed record numbers of prisoners since Municipal Court judges terminated a program that allowed many misdemeanor offenders to stay free awaiting trial.

Cornist’s husband, Glen, had a near-monopoly on court referrals for nearly a year, when Day worked for him, recruiting clients in the county’s courts. But his business, Western States Re-Entry Corp., collapsed early this year. A client’s complaints prompted inquiries by the Probation Department and a Superior Court judge. And Day defected to Center Court, a competing program that quickly gained the bulk of court referrals.

According to the lawsuit, Barbara Cornist hired Day last month to recruit clients for Alternative Resources. He quit within a few weeks: She says he didn’t show up for work; he says she failed to pay him. Day now is in business for himself. He said Monday that a clause in his contract with Alternative Resources, barring him from competing for 120 days after he left the program, is legally unenforceable.

Gerald Williams, chief deputy probation officer for adult services, said Monday that the lawsuit alone is unlikely to influence judges’ decisions on whether to use the programs involved in the dispute.

But Williams warned that the continuing upheaval in the private corrections world cannot help but harm everyone in the business, by making judges hesitant about placing offenders in the programs.

“The more you get involved in these internal kind of things, I personally don’t think it’s going to help that industry,” he said.