Conditional Jail Furlough Contract OKd

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a contract Tuesday with a private work-furlough center that, for the first time, requires strict law enforcement scrutiny of its inmates.

With the board’s vote, 70 low-risk inmates of the Pacific Furlough Facility in Logan Heights will be under the review of the county Probation Department, which will send a full-time administrator to inspect and monitor all aspects of the program.

“This is major progress,” said Lou Boyle, a chief deputy district attorney who has been pushing for greater supervision of private work-furlough centers. “This is a good attempt by the county of San Diego to ensure public safety and inmate safety at these facilities.”

Private work furlough allows offenders to stay out of County Jail as long as they pay their own room and board and maintain a job or seek employment. Local judges have endorsed the concept of private centers as a way to relieve jail crowding.

But, as The Times reported in July, the work-furlough centers operate with no law enforcement scrutiny and little screening.

Some offenders sentenced to the facilities later were arrested for possession of drugs, firearms and other crimes, The Times found. One felon did not report to a private center and ended up in jail only after he shot a sheriff’s deputy. One work-furlough resident testified in court that he used cocaine but avoided detection through drug testing by bribing a work-furlough employee.

San Diego’s centers are the only ones in the state that are not under contract with the county, The Times reported.

Tuesday’s 4-0 vote authorizes the county to sign a three-month contract with Pacific Furlough, owned by Ernest H. Wright, a former San Diego Chargers player. Wright’s company will pay nearly $14,000 for a probation officer to screen the people admitted into the program.

An oversight committee of the sheriff, county chief administrative officer, chief probation officer, district attorney, county counsel, judges representing the Superior and Municipal courts and a citizen will determine how well the new system is working after 90 days.

Among the recommendations will be whether the entire work-furlough program, including the county’s system, should be turned over to private interests and its monitoring expanded to other private interests that want contracts.

While county officials were quick to praise the results of negotiations with Pacific Furlough, others say the action failed to go far enough.

“I am pleased that a formal action will bring the operation into compliance . . . at long last,” said Verna Quinn, a member of the city of San Diego’s Planning Commission. “However, if there is only one probation officer for 70 inmates, the contract doesn’t seem adequate to me. The discussion on this issue always centers on the well-being of the offenders. Who is considering the public and its safety?”

County probation officials, who had suggested that at least three staff members be assigned to Pacific Furlough, also balked at the low level of staffing, but county managers suggested it could be expanded if the private program grew.

Michel Anderson, a spokesman for Pacific, said he is pleased with the new contract.

“We’ll be under a microscope for 90 days, and we know it and we welcome it,” he said. “This is a prime example of privatization done at its best. This contract will be at no cost--repeat, no cost--to the county.”

Several other private companies have work-furlough centers in San Diego County. An attorney for Mid-City Work Furlough, which operates an 84-bed facility in San Diego, objected at Tuesday’s board meeting to the county awarding a contract when original bids called for companies to spend at least $142,000 a year for the Probation Department to monitor inmates.

In reducing the cost to $14,000 for a 90-day program and waiving the competitive procurement process, as the Board of Supervisors did Tuesday, the county acted inappropriately, said F. Sigmund Luther, a Mid-City attorney. “The providers need to have the same opportunity to be in negotiations on the same issues at the same time,” he said.

Rich Robinson, the county’s director of special projects, said the county counsel has advised him that awarding a sole-source contract with Pacific was legal.

“We told Mid-City that they could bid on this, but they didn’t stay with it,” Robinson said. “Pacific took a calculated risk and now they have the contract for 90 days.”

Local judges can still decide whether they want to sentence offenders to Pacific, which has a contract, to other private facilities or to the county’s work-furlough program.

But Frederic L. Link, supervising criminal judge of the San Diego County Superior Court, said that while he has always supported the use of Pacific, he is even more inclined to sentence someone to the facility now that it has a contract.

“This gives me a little bit more of a security blanket,” Link said. “My No. 1 job is to protect the public and reduce the risk to the public, so I’ll be taking more of a look at Pacific. We’re happy that the issue of the contract has been settled.”

The city of San Diego is in the midst of hiring a code enforcement officer to determine whether private work-furlough centers meet city standards, but decided to hold off until the county signed its contract. The city also requires that such facilities have a conditional-use permit before they can operate.