County Meets Court’s Deadline for Reducing Crowding at Jail

Mainly by speeding up the transfer of state parole violators and by sending minor violators home instead of to jail, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block has met a federal court-imposed deadline to reduce the inmate population at the Men’s Central Jail to 6,800 prisoners. But just barely.

Attorneys for the county and the American Civil Liberties Union toured the downtown Los Angeles facility on Wednesday--the court’s deadline--to make sure that inmate numbers had been trimmed to the court-ordered ceiling. What they found was a prisoner population of 6,768, about 3,000 fewer than last spring when both sides agreed to the Nov. 19 deadline.

“I do think (the inmate reduction) reflects a good faith effort on the part of the sheriff,” said ACLU attorney John Hagar. But Hagar predicted that the inmate population will creep back over the court-ordered ceiling, possibly as soon as next month, and warned that he will be closely monitoring the situation.

Slightly more optimistic than Hagar, Frederick Bennett, principal deputy county counsel, said the prisoner population ceiling will be maintained “until early 1987, at which time we expect to marginally exceed it by a few hundred inmates until July.” At that time, the overcrowding will be relieved by the opening of two new jail facilities housing nearly 1,100 prisoners, Bennett said.

Bennett added that under the inmate-ceiling agreement, the Sheriff’s Department has 12 hours in which to reduce the Central Jail population any time it exceeds the 6,800 inmate limit.

Most of the reduction of 3,000 inmates was not achieved simply by shifting prisoners to other jail facilities, attorneys on both sides said. Instead, the ceiling was reached by expanding certain out-of-jail programs. These include a work-release plan, in which low-risk prisoners serve part of their sentences at home while working on county clean-up projects, and citation release, in which suspected minor offenders are cited in the manner of traffic violators.

The largest chunk of the inmate reduction, about 1,000 prisoners, involved an agreement with the state to accelerate its handling of parole violators who had been housed in the county facility until their hearings.

Although most of the Central Jail’s overflow was not shifted to other facilities, the county jail system’s inmate population still exceeds 20,000, although it was built to handle only 12,300. The ACLU suit, however, dealt primarily with the Central Jail.