Inmate Releases Hurt Police Morale : Survey: UCI professor inverviews 17 chiefs. They say officers feel they are wasting time because of jail overcrowding.

Overcrowded conditions in the Orange County Jail have contributed to sagging morale among Orange County police officers, who believe that the people they arrest are released too quickly, according to a recently published survey by a UC Irvine professor.

“With a considerable degree of consensus, the police chiefs said their officers felt like they were wasting their time because of jail overcrowding,” said social ecology professor Henry Pontell, who led a team of associates in interviews with 17 of the county’s 21 police chiefs.

Officers “were seeing the same people they might have just arrested being released after spending little or no time in jail,” said Pontell, whose information was gathered over a period of three months during 1989 and 1990 and published in a recent issue of the Police Studies journal.

Pontell said 88% of the chiefs interviewed believed that jail crowding has been at least partly responsible for diminishing department morale.

In recent years, county officials have spent millions of dollars for studies of possible jail locations, all of which have met disagreement, while crowded conditions have forced jail officials to engage in early-release programs for some offenders.

According to the study, every chief interviewed said that crowded conditions have had an overall “negative impact” on public safety.

“Their reasons included decreased ability to arrest and detain violent offenders, decreased arrests and early releases for all types of offenders and inability to arrest and detain drunken drivers,” the survey stated.

Pontell said the survey results were based only on the chiefs’ responses and were not compared with crime statistics from their individual departments.

Costa Mesa Police Chief David L. Snowden, one of the 17 interviewed, said Thursday that the existing jail conditions have not caused his officers to curtail arrests but admitted that there is little incentive for criminals to change their behavior.

“I believe in swift and sure punishment, but that’s not part of our system now,” said Snowden, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn. “The criminal these days knows he’s not going to do jail time for his crime. The criminal has to know he’s going to do jail time. That notion has to be reinforced throughout California.”

In his own department, Snowden said, he has seen the effects crowded jails can have on officers.

“They spend a lot of time and hard effort in making cases,” the chief said. “Sometimes they even risk their lives doing their jobs, and then they see, maybe within a week, the person they just put away driving by waving at them.”

In a poll of possible long-term solutions, the chiefs offered a combination of approaches. The survey found that 63% favored building more jails; 57% recommended increased use of early anti-crime education and/or diversion; while 7% suggested incarcerating only serious offenders.

“I think there has to be an integrated approach in solving this problem,” Pontell said. “Very little had been done in looking at how this issue affects our police departments. Police play an important role in this system.”