Courts Have Done What They Can : Answer to Severe Overcrowding of Jails Is--Well, Obvious

The courts are doing what they can to keep the judicial system moving, but they are only part of the total system that clearly is not working as well as it could.

Jail overcrowding is a serious problem in Los Angeles County. While the official capacity for all jails is 12,556, the actual population on any given day is approximately 22,500, about 10,000 more than the system was designed to handle. The figures are mind-boggling.

There is general agreement that Sheriff Sherman Block, the man charged with the responsibility of running the jail system, has done an outstanding job of dealing with this immense problem, but it’s obvious that even he can’t manufacture secure jail beds out of thin air.

Early this year, the American Civil Liberties Union, as part of a longstanding lawsuit in federal court, began to focus its attention on the Los Angeles County Superior Court. The ACLU asserted that criminal cases were moving too slowly through the court and that this was a substantial contributing cause to jail overcrowding.

We didn’t believe this was true. In California, criminal cases have priority over most other cases and must be brought to trial within 60 days after a defendant’s first appearance in Superior Court. A defendant may agree to extend this time. However, if he does not and the trial is not begun within the statutory period, the defendant’s motion to dismiss must be granted. In Los Angeles, the Superior Court has been able to meet this short time requirement in all cases, even if it’s meant interrupting civil trials to do so.

Notwithstanding our belief that we were handling criminal cases expeditiously, our court voluntarily agreed to develop and implement a 90-day program to move these cases to trial even more quickly. To accomplish this we agreed to set aside up to 43 civil courts (one-half of the courts hearing civil matters in the county) on any given day to hear criminal cases. The purpose of this program, which became known as CRASH, was to determine if there would be a substantial reduction in jail overcrowding by expediting the handling of criminal cases.

The program began on July 15. By the time the program was scheduled to end 90 days later, we had found that the effort had produced a reduction in the daily use of jail beds of between 100 and 125. In other words, we had reduced a jail overcrowding problem of 10,000 to a jail overcrowding problem of between 9,875 and 9,900. While any reduction is welcome, it’s difficult to characterize this as “substantial.”

But this is only part of the picture. To be fair about it, the “success” of CRASH must be measured against the effect it had on our ability to handle other court cases.

In addition to criminal cases, the Superior Court must deliver judicial services to the public in many other areas as well, such as family law (divorce, child custody and support), probate, mental health, juvenile and general civil, including personal injury and business matters. During CRASH, while almost 43 of our civil judges were hearing criminal cases, our list of civil cases ready to go trial in the Central District doubled (from 75 to 150) and 40 cases ran over the mandatory five-year dismissal date. Only two civil jury trials were heard in both the Northeast (Pasadena) and South (Long Beach) districts and civil cases in most of the other districts fell further behind. Without belaboring the point, the reallocation of civil judges to criminal cases during CRASH was severely detrimental to civil litigants.

This is probably why the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. is contemplating a lawsuit against courts and other governmental agencies for failing to provide enough courtrooms and other resources to deal with the growing load of civil cases.

There are steps that can and should be taken that will reduce jail overcrowding. A recently formed task force, made up of about a dozen judges and attorneys, has met and is evaluating several programs. These include early disposition of less complex and serious criminal cases before the preliminary hearing and immediate Superior Court arraignment of a defendant at the conclusion of the preliminary hearing. Either plan should have greater impact on overcrowding than CRASH without the negative effect on civil matters.

The Los Angeles County Superior Court is doing an outstanding job of handling its judicial business with the resources it has. But it needs more judges and court facilities to do the job properly. A recent caseload study released by the State Judicial Council found that our court was more than 120 judges short of what is necessary to adequately perform our work. In view of this, we believe it’s unreasonable to expect the court to increase its judicial commitment to criminal at the expense of civil litigants, especially when the impact on jail overcrowding appears to be so minimal.

At the risk of appearing overly simplistic, I submit that the real answer to jail overcrowding is to build more jails.