No Time to Scrap Inmate Program : Letting women serve time at home saves taxpayer money, frees up jail space

Sheriff Jim Roache is looking for ways to cut spending in his department. Good. With the recession lingering and all levels of government fiscally suffering, everyone has to cut back. But Roache’s recent decision to scrap a highly successful program that allows low-risk female inmates to serve their time at home simply doesn’t pencil out.

The 5-year-old program, which monitors inmates with the use of electronic ankle bracelets, saved taxpayers money and freed up scarce jail space in a county with one of the most crowded detention systems in the nation. Pulling the plug on it now raises questions about the sheriff’s judgment and motives.

The sheriff says canceling the electronic surveillance program will save his department $200,000. Even if that were true, it’s a drop in the fiscal bucket given the department’s current $68-million budget for detention programs. But under close scrutiny even those promised savings evaporate.

Incarcerating an inmate at home costs the county less than $5 a day; keeping that same person in a jail cell costs almost $60 a day. Sound like a program that should be scrapped in tough economic times?

And the county doesn’t have to cover the health-care costs of inmates serving time at home. The inmates are free to continue using veterans benefits, health maintenance organizations or any other health plan to which they are entitled. That alone has saved the county thousands of dollars, according to Richard Ariessohn, chief counselor of the county’s detention facilities.

If anything, home-detention programs should be expanded --especially with the county facing a June 30 deadline to finally push the jail population under the court-ordered cap of 3,685 inmates. But year after year they have been underutilized.

Ideally, the women’s program would have had 100 participants this year, according to Ariessohn. By the time Roache killed the program, there were only 11.

Scrapping the program also raised questions of equity. Women who can afford it have received court permission to enroll in privately run surveillance programs time at home. But at a cost of about $450 a month, will home-detention become a program only for the rich?

It’s important to note that roughly 90% of the hundreds of women who participated in the program over the years completed it without a single violation of the rules. No one committed a violent crime while enrolled, according to Ariessohn.

So why did Roache cancel the program, just as he scrapped a similar effort for men earlier this year? He says it was purely a budget decision. But recently he’s taken some heat from state and local prosecutors for abusing the program.

The latest controversy smacked of special treatment for a drunk driver whose father works for the district attorney’s office. The woman, Renee Reid, was released to the program after serving only 31 days in jail on charges of gross vehicular manslaughter while driving drunk. The state attorney general’s office complained, and a municipal judge ordered the woman back to jail.

Such abuses rightly outraged the public. But they are no reason to close a cost-effective, humane program that should be part of the solution to the county’s jail crisis.