Sheriff Ends Inmate Home Detention : Punishment: System came under fire when a drunk driver who killed a man was released to electronic surveillance after 31 days in jail.

A controversial home detention program for female inmates was discontinued Friday by Sheriff Jim Roache, who ordered those on the electronic surveillance system to be returned to jail immediately, sheriff’s officials said.

Roache’s decision to abandon the program was based solely on the department’s inability to pay the $200,000-a-year cost to monitor those in home detention, officials said.

“I was told that the program had ended, and the women still on the program would be rounded up and brought back to jail,” said Dick Ariessohn, supervisor of the correctional counselors who oversee home monitoring. “We were told it was too expensive, and the county doesn’t have the money.”

Two employees of the County Jail at Las Colinas, who asked not to be named, said the 11 women still on the program were returned to the jail Friday and electronic surveillance ended.

Roache, sheriff’s spokesman Dan Greenblat and Cmdr. Jim Decker, who manages the program, did not return repeated calls for comment Friday.

Besides the cost of electronic monitoring, many questioned its usefulness when The Times revealed that an 18-year-old drunk driver who killed a Lakeside man had been released to home surveillance after just 31 days in jail. The woman, Renee Reid, had received a one-year sentence.

After the stories appeared, the state attorney general’s office petitioned the judge who made the original sentence to return Reid to jail, arguing that home detention was not harsh enough punishment for Reid.

In April, Municipal Judge Terry J. Knoepp ordered Reid back into custody. He revealed in court that he had intended all along that Reid not be put on home surveillance and checked a box on the sentencing form that he believed prohibited the alternative.

In Reid’s case, questions were raised as to whether home detention constituted punishment and whether a favored class of criminal was invited to participate. Corrections counselors and a jail captain said Reid was admitted to the program because she represented almost no risk of repeating her crime.

But they also said she came from a “good family,” which many took to mean that she was from a middle-class, white family with a father who worked as a district attorney’s investigator. Sheriff’s officials vigorously denied she received special treatment, although a state prosecutor raised the issue before Knoepp.

Ariessohn, the counselors’ supervisor, said the department intentionally stopped putting women into the program in the last several weeks after Roache told The Times that he was likely to scrap electronic surveillance altogether.

Last fall, Roache discontinued a year-old home detention program for men that was operated by the Sheriff’s Department because it was too costly. The county’s probation department now runs the men’s program.

Roache considered doing the same to the women’s program last year because of money problems, but came up with funds to finance it through the end of this fiscal year, which ends in 10 days.

Some of those being held at Las Colinas will be placed in a work furlough program, which allows them to work by day and spend nights and weekends in jail, Ariessohn said.

Ariessohn lamented the loss of the women’s program.

“Some women who had special foster care to deal with or health problems now won’t be able to spend time at home,” he said. “For some, there won’t be any special programs at all. When you phase out human services programs, it becomes one less sentencing option for the courts.”

Some judges, including H. Ronald Domnitz of the Municipal Court, and Frederic L. Link of the Superior Court, are strongly opposed to home detention and have said they hoped it could be eliminated.