Commentary : In Jail Crunch, County Must Review Options Other Than More Cages

Jail overcrowding in Orange County continues to be a significant social problem as we move into the 1990s. It became a major challenge for local policy-makers in 1978, when the county and the sheriff were ordered by a federal court judge to reduce crowding in the main jail in Santa Ana.

In 1985, the Board of Supervisors and the sheriff were held in contempt by the same federal judge for failing to comply with his 7-year-old order. Since then, the situation either has become worse or has not improved, depending how one looks at it.

The proposed solution of adding jail cells at enormous taxpayer expense has divided the county into warring “NIMBY” (Not in My Back Yard) groups, causing unnecessary litigation, wasted time and additional cost, and has accomplished very little toward relieving jail overcrowding. In fact, the taxpayer expense is considerably more than the public is probably aware of, because the immense original construction cost doubles every seven years.

The most recently suggested idea of joining Riverside County in building a regional jail in the desert, which would eliminate the need for the 6,700-bed facility planned for Gypsum Canyon, may, if nothing else, demonstrate that the best political strategy regarding the jail issue is “out of sight, out of mind.”

While the Orange County Board of Supervisors has focused its attention (and ours) on building new facilities as the panacea to jail overcrowding, efforts to resolve the problem could be moved in a different direction that would result in more serious thinking and realistic expectations regarding the use of punishment resources and the enhancement of public safety.

Before embarking on a dramatic jail construction program, a detailed and balanced examination must be made not only of the incredible economic consequences, but also of other sentencing methods (for example, expanding and initiating such mechanisms as work furlough, community service, electronic monitoring and intensive supervision, to name but a few promising ones) and better coordination in the criminal justice system.

The county simply cannot afford not to employ and expand on such alternatives to incarceration with selected offenders--unless, of course, taxpayers come up with the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to provide extensive incarceration. Even so, such extensive incarceration would come with no guarantee of an actual reduction in crime; in fact, the opposite has held true, as increasing incarceration rates have been accompanied by higher crime rates.

In the past, the county has been denied state funding for failing to adequately develop and detail such creative, alternative proposals (“sent back to do their homework,” as one official reported). It is such tunnel vision regarding punishment policy that has helped turn efforts to relieve overcrowding in the county into a political and financial fiasco, with the ultimate costs thrust on taxpayers.

The first “radical” idea that must be injected into policy proposals is that the jail cannot and should not be considered as a separate entity in criminal justice, but rather as inexorably tied to other institutions, most notably courts and police. “Solutions” to overcrowding that focus alone on absolute capacity or the number of jail cells are thus doomed to failure from the start.

Second, there must be strong leadership at both the county and state level to produce detailed criminal justice management proposals; thorough examination of the use of existing resources; a commitment to innovative sentencing options and their expansion when successful, and an increase in interagency cooperation and coordination among criminal justice agencies.

Having a broad-based commission to produce such proposals is a much better route than continuing to allow the system to slowly self-destruct, leaving justice by the wayside for victims and defendants and spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a non-solution to crime.

This leads to a final point on which there already is a considerable degree of expert consensus: Serious attention to prevention and education will go a lot further in reducing crime than will incarcerating criminals.

A crisis mentality regarding jail overcrowding will do more harm than good, both fiscally and socially, and should be abandoned. Only then will policy-makers be able to seriously consider crime and its punishment--and develop effective long-term policies.