Wristlets Required : Home Serves as Men’s Jail in Test Cases

With bands strapped to their wrists and warnings to behave, two men convicted of drunk driving began a pilot program Friday by serving their sentences at home at night instead of behind jail bars.

Both men had been on work furlough status, holding down day jobs and spending evenings and weekends in the James A. Musick branch jail near El Toro.

Now they will return home evenings and don special wristlets, which they must insert into a special coupler on command from a recorded voice on a telephone that will ring at random hours.

“Hello, this is a community control officer,” the brief message begins. “I will pause 10 seconds for the correct person to come to the phone.” In those 10 seconds, the inmate on the electronic leash must reach the phone and briefly insert the wristlet.

‘Cheaper Than Jail’

“I think it is a concept made possible by technology that should be tested,” said Marie Whittington, a supervising probation officer who studied similar programs across the nation and drafted the proposal for this one.

“Obviously, it’s cheaper than jail,” she said, because it costs $15 a day for the equipment and supervision, compared with $30 to $50 daily for a jail stay.

Like work furlough inmates, those in this program will pay $7 to $18 a day, depending on their income and the size of their families.

The program is planned to handle up to 25 inmates at once. They must be volunteers within 30 to 60 days of finishing their sentences, have approval from the judges who sentenced them and be considered low risks.

The telephone dials again if it gets a busy signal, and the wristlets--which resemble black, high-tech wristwatches without the face pieces--stretch out of shape if someone tries to remove them. Each wristlet matches its own coupler. But Whittington said the most important anti-tampering device is the probation officer who will cruise past the inmate’s house at unannounced times.

Some Try to Cheat

Whittington said that some inmates elsewhere in the country have tried to beat the system, and she expects this will happen in Orange County. But she said the possibility of losing work furlough status and spending the rest of his sentence behind bars should make the inmate think twice about cheating.

The one-year program is expected to cost $175,000, about $58,000 of which will come from fees paid by the inmates in the program.

It is one of a series of steps county officials are taking to relieve overcrowding at the main men’s jail in Santa Ana.

A federal judge ordered an improvement in jail conditions in 1978, and last year fined the county for violating his order. The judge also has set a population limit at the main jail of 1,400 during the week, and 1,450 during weekends.

The at-home incarceration program will make 25 more beds available at the minimum-security Musick branch jail for transferees from the main jail.