That Loose Jailhouse Door

It all has a ridiculous air of hopelessness now. A Los Angeles County jail-control system so antiquated that it relies on massive amounts of paperwork to track the movements of thousands of prisoners per day.

Under that system, 42 inmates, including five murder suspects, have been released by mistake since January 1995. Just one of the murder suspects has been recaptured. Meanwhile, about 500 inmates were held in jail too long, also because of paperwork snafus.

The millions of dollars that the Sheriff’s Department has spent on fancy computer systems over the years won’t help. Those computers weren’t designed for these matters, you see. And the public is told that the kind of computer system specifically designed to coordinate prisoner whereabouts for the jail system, the court system and the district attorney’s office is years away.

As a stopgap measure, a few more clerks, including newly installed senior clerks, are being pushed into handling the jail tracking system. That won’t do the trick. Indeed, just last week four more prisoners were released by mistake. Three of them were recaptured. Following that, the Sheriff’s Department juggled more managers in the hope that new blood might help achieve a solution.

Now it turns out, however, that the county already has a fairly routine system in place that permits different computer systems to converse with one another. You can consider such an interface as an interpreter for two people who speak different languages, and it could be used for better electronic tracking of prisoners between the jail computers and the court computers, but only if everyone along the line, including the court system, makes prompt use of it.

Certainly, this is something that the Board of Supervisors can embrace, and it makes far more sense than the proposal to add an oversight committee that would try to review the several hundreds of inmate releases each day. Better use of existing electronic systems could reduce paperwork and sharply curtail the need to search for, and rearrest, prisoners who should not have been released in the first place.