Questions Whirl Around Sheriff Block’s Numbers : If L.A. jail can open now, why has it stood empty so long?

When the issue involves Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and his budget, the Board of Supervisors begins to resemble the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund asking a protected head of state about the way he’s handling his books. In fact, some foreign leaders are more expansive than the sheriff. Block is good at hiding his cards, and the supervisors are pretty bad at ferreting out the budgetary flexibility he has.

For months, Block insisted that more than $100 million and a drastic cut in patrols would be required to open and operate Twin Towers, the county’s new and still vacant $373-million jail on the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles. Construction was completed last fall. The delay in operation has been a significant waste, given that L.A. County jails are woefully overcrowded, that inmates as a result serve less of their sentences than their counterparts elsewhere in the country and that hard-core criminals sometimes have to be housed at facilities that were never intended to hold them.

Now Block says that Twin Towers can be opened in January for about $25 million less than he originally claimed and without taking deputies off the street. This, of course, is welcome news, but questions arise. In a presentation to the supervisors, Block offered little in the way of hard details on certain aspects of his proposal, even when questioned. When asked how he had found a cheaper way to operate the jail, Block merely said that he had “shifted around” personnel and found other cost-cutting measures. Not too enlightening.

Other answers are needed too. Was Block being accurate last spring when he cited daunting higher costs and talked of pulling deputies off the streets? Weren’t today’s options available then? Couldn’t they have been exercised to coincide with the completion of construction?

The supervisors didn’t seem inclined to pursue such inquiries but did ask that details about the plan be submitted by Oct. 10. “I’m not going to look back,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “I’m going to look forward. If I look back, all I see are bad things.”

To be sure, L.A. County is not alone in terms of crowded jails. Orange County, for example, has been under a federal court order to reduce jail overcrowding for more than two decades. Despite the expansion of jails, it still is forced to let some inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes leave before their sentences are served to make room for new inmates. Orange County hopes to get funds for a new jail through a bond issue on the November ballot. No site has been chosen.

Doubts also surround the Twin Towers funding. Block says he can open the jail and have a net gain of 1,818 beds for inmates across the county; in part this would be accomplished by leasing other county jail space to the federal government. But that plan, he says, is viable only through the next fiscal year. “After that,” Block told a reporter, “I can’t predict.”

Block’s Twin Towers “solution” raises more questions than it answers. It should lead the supervisors to demand that the sheriff open his books, divulging his options and areas of flexibility. A serious debt is owed the public over the fact that Twin Towers has been held vacant these long months. A plan that ensures having the jail open only through the next fiscal year is hardly grounds for standing applause.