Prisoner Juggling Act Is Nationwide Problem : Crowding: Solutions, ranging from shorter sentences to new jails, offer only a temporary reprieve.

In New York City, jail officials float barges on either side of Manhattan to hold inmates who can no longer be crammed onto Rikers Island.

In Portland, Ore., police don’t bother taking into custody people who commit less than serious crimes. They give shoplifters and auto theft suspects tickets instead.

And in Philadelphia, tax dollars are used to bail out minor offenders so they don’t have to be given a cell.

Since a “get tough on crime” wind began sweeping the land about 15 years ago, officials say the nation’s local slammers have been busting out all over. Like housekeepers at a hotel during the peak of convention season, jail officials from Secaucus to San Jose have been scrambling for ways to rush inmates out of their cells so they can make room for new arrivals.

Orange County--with about 4,400 prisoners crammed into facilities designed for 3,203--is no exception.

This week, an expert appointed by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray is expected to report on conditions within the county’s five jails. Responding to an inmate lawsuit, Gray in 1978 imposed a population limit at the Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana. And the judge, who was recently asked to extend the limit systemwide, has directed special monitor Lawrence Grossman to also outline county efforts to build a new facility.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, lawsuits to ease overcrowded jail conditions are pending in 134 cities, including Los Angeles--which operates the nation’s largest jail system. The department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics puts the national jail population at 395,000, 15% higher than the previous year, although the number of jail beds only increased by half that much.

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a city that wasn’t under some sort of court order,” said Alan Henry, executive director of the nonprofit Pretrial Services Resource Center, a Washington group that has worked with jurisdictions throughout the country. “There are many, many, many cities with overcrowding at some level, and in some cases, when they open up a new jail, three weeks later they are already overcrowded.”

In the meantime, local authorities are struggling to cope, using an array of short-term solutions as mounting numbers of arrestees are dropped off at the front door.

They are double-bunking prisoners. Or shortening sentences for convicted inmates. Or letting out suspects before they go to trial. Some have resorted to more drastic measures:

“We’ve heard of instances where police keep people in their cars just waiting for room at the jails to come up,” said Tony Travesona, executive director of the American Correctional Assn. “We’ve had other situations where police kept arrestees on buses waiting for room at local jails. It’s a very tragic situation nationwide.

“It’s worse than a crisis in the metropolitan areas of our country. The Orange Counties and the San Joses and the Chicagos, Detroits, Miamis are all suffering more or less the same problem. . . . Police would be able to pick up more people committing crime if there were more room at the jails.”

Short of building jails, some jurisdictions have tried to streamline booking operations, speed up court hearings, put more inmates to work--and in some cases ask them to pay for the privilege. Others are strapping electronic monitoring bracelets around the legs of criminals who have been released to serve their sentences at home. And still others are working more with judges and prosecutors to cut down on pretrial jail time.

Like other jurisdictions, Orange County jailers have tried a number of these methods. For example:

* In Atlanta, nonviolent criminals are released without bail within seven days of arrests, and the city has 25,000 outstanding warrants for fugitives. Orange County releases all inmates charged with misdemeanors after they are cited at the jail.

* In Hudson County, N.J., officials opened a “tent city” for minimum-security inmates. At Orange County’s James A. Musick Branch Jail, almost a third of the 1,250 inmates sleep in military-style tents.

* Houston’s Harris County has brought a civil suit against the state, seeking more than $80 million to pay for housing state prisoners in its overcrowded jails. The county was ordered by a federal judge last week to reduce its inmate population to 6,000 by Dec. 31--down from the current 6,747--even if it has to rent jail space elsewhere.

Orange County sheriff’s officials, meanwhile, persuaded prison officials in Sacramento to let them transfer state inmates out of county jails twice a day, not just once a week, reducing to only a few hours the time a state prisoner would spend in county custody.

Experts caution, however, that even innovative solutions can backfire.

For example, in Orange County, a community service program that allows more than 700 convicted inmates to live at home and perform work at public facilities has freed up some jail beds. But because the shortage of jail space has forced Sheriff Brad Gates to release some inmates early, judges are finding it harder to convince defendants that they should opt to perform community service when sentenced.

“If they do the volunteer service, they’ll do 10 days,” Central Municipal Presiding Judge Richard W. Stanford Jr. said. “But they’ll say: ‘Why should I do all that volunteer service when I could just do three days in jail?’ ”

The shortage of jail space has even forced some counties to review who should be left in charge of running their jails, a task that in California traditionally has fallen to sheriff’s departments.

When Santa Clara County, which includes the city of San Jose, found itself embroiled in inmate litigation and having to pay more and more to run its overcrowded jails, county supervisors wrested the facilities away from the sheriff and created their own Department of Corrections, with the approval of voters in November, 1988.

It became only the third jurisdiction in the state to create a separate corrections agency, after Napa and Madera counties. The change was not an easy one politically or financially, but it was prompted by issues of management, Santa Clara County Supervisor Zoe Lofgren said.

“It was our view that we were so overcrowded that the easiest way to get out of jail was to plead guilty because then you would be let out,” Lofgren said. “It was absurd.”

The suggestion to create a separate correctional department in Orange County was made in an “Alternatives to Incarceration” study done four years ago, said Dan Wooldridge, aide to Supervisor Chairman Don R. Roth. But nothing has come of the recommendation.

Wooldridge said only two programs suggested in that study have been put in place.

The county now has an electronic bracelet monitoring program, where about 150 people--ordered to serve out their probation terms or shortened sentences inside their homes--wear a device that lets jail officials track their movements.

The county also created two halfway houses for drug offenders that shelter about 150 inmates, Wooldridge said, adding that Roth--who was unavailable for comment--is interested in pushing for more innovations.

Jail officials in Washington, where overcrowding has been a controversial issue for two decades, recently struck a unique partnership with the federal government in hopes of building more jail space.

The American Civil Liberties Union had long complained about conditions at an old District of Columbia jail, “a 19th-Century institution, with pigeons flying through the roofs,” according to Ed Koren, a lawyer with the ACLU’s National Prison Program. In the late 1970s, the facility was closed and replaced by a new jail. But Koren said that jail was “full the day it opened.”

The U.S. attorney general’s office, meanwhile, was having its own trouble finding a site for federal offenders. So earlier this year, the two governments announced that they would combine resources to build a joint facility to be run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. They have yet to select a site, however.

When constructing a jail proves too difficult an option, cities and counties frequently have turned to early release programs.

In Philadelphia, a federal court has ordered that suspects in “low-priority” crimes be released without bail unless they have been arrested at least twice before.

When bail is required, the city often pays it to keep the suspect from taking up jail space.

“It’s very distressing,” said Catherine Bachrach, director of the nonprofit Northwest Victims Services in Philadelphia. “When someone is robbed on the street, there is an expectation on the victim’s part that the defendant will be taken into custody and bail will be set. . . . It generates a lot of fear and lot of concern on the part of the victims.”

As cities have continued to grow, and tax dollars become more scarce, the chorus to search for still other jail alternatives has risen among government experts and officials.

Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a San Francisco think tank, said that when counties and cities commit millions and even billions of dollars to jails, social services inevitably suffer.

“Building more jails to solve the crime problem is the same as if we had said years ago, ‘Let’s build hundreds of more iron lungs so we can beat polio,’ ” he said. “You cannot solve the problem of crime with more jails, just as you cannot solve the problem of AIDS by building more hospitals.”

The Nation’s Busiest Jails

Average Daily Jail Rank/County Major City Population, 1989 1. Los Angeles Co., CA Los Angeles 22,426 2. New York City, NY New York 16,597 3. Harris Co, TX Houston 8,208 4. Cook Co., IL Chicago 7,000 5. Dallas Co., TX Dallas 5,600 6. Dade Co. FL Miami 4,773 7. San Diego Co., CA San Diego 4,477 8. Shelby Co., TN Memphis 4,452 9. Santa Clara Co., CA San Jose 4,316 10. Orange Co. CA Santa Ana 4,281 11. Philadelphia Co., PA Philadelphia 4,277 12. Maricopa Co., AR Phoenix 3,905 13. New Orleans Parish, LA New Orleans 3,700 14. Sacramento Co., CA Sacramento 3,321 15. Alameda Co., CA Oakland 3,110

Source: U.S. Department of Justice survey of 25 largest jurisdictions.