Block May Share Oversight of Work Release

In a tacit acknowledgment that it has failed to control its jail work-release program, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is moving to relinquish much of its long-standing authority for weeding out convicted inmates who are considered too dangerous to send back to the streets.

The massive department would turn over the responsibility for screening and evaluating work-release candidates to the county Probation Department in a plan under discussion this week by county officials.

“We’re going to look at this from the point of public safety first [in judging who should be let out of jail early],” said Nelson Offley, a senior Probation Department official. “I don’t think [sheriff’s officials] had a clear criteria. They had a need to use expediency in reducing the jail population, and they seem now to realize that they need a better system.”

Said sheriff’s custody chief Barry King: “This is a more viable solution.”

The move is an unusual one for a department that in recent years has rarely agreed to give away responsibilities and has sought instead to expand its powers in areas that had belonged to other county departments--such as purchasing and computer operations.

The county Board of Supervisors, which must approve any shift in responsibilities, ordered county officials last month to look at the idea of giving the Probation Department more oversight for the work program to avoid the early release of “dangerous inmates.”

Overcrowding in the jails has prompted the Sheriff’s Department to rely heavily on the work-release program in recent years, letting inmates serve their sentences out of custody by doing manual labor by day at public work sites and returning home at night. The Sheriff’s Department now makes all decisions on who should be allowed out.

Among the other changes in the plan now being considered: All work-release inmates would be subject to electronic monitoring, and participants would spend some of their “work” days attending classes on such issues as anger management, alcohol abuse and self-esteem.

The proposed overhaul comes in the wake of a report in The Times that found massive shortcomings in the work-release program, allowing tens of thousands of convicted inmates to get out of jail early without even cursory reviews of their criminal records.

The program was designed for low-risk offenders. But the Times investigation found that violent and repeat offenders--some with dozens of convictions, jailed for such crimes as drug-dealing, robbery and assault--have routinely been freed. Thousands of participants--as many as one in three--have simply skipped out on their work assignments, and many have gone on to commit new and more serious crimes even before their original sentences have ended.

Late last year, after The Times successfully sued the Sheriff’s Department for the names of those missing from the work-release program, the department expanded its efforts to catch the convicts on the lam. In early December, there were more than 2,000 skip-outs; today, there are about 1,500.

In a recent interview, Sheriff Sherman Block said he was surprised to learn of the program’s many problems and pledged to clean them up. Newly disclosed records, however, show that Block and other top department officials knew as long as two years ago that serious criminals were being freed without regard to the department’s screening criteria.

Block was told personally about the problem in a conversation March 14, 1995, according to a memo written that same day by the deputy who briefed him.

Block wanted to know “why we had released inmates that had been arrested for robbery, and other serious crimes. I explained to him that those inmates were released without any criteria being applied. He asked who gave the order to do this,” according to the memo, obtained by The Times under the California Public Records Act.

The 1995 conversation was apparently prompted by Block’s concerns over an earlier memo, written eight days before, that detailed the crimes committed by inmates who had been let out on work release during a four-day period.

The memo showed that at least 36 inmates were jailed on charges involving violence or weapons, including robbery and assault. Another 66 people were behind bars for drunk driving--a crime that demands jail time under state law and is now exempted from work release under the sheriff’s most recent policy.

And 236 drug offenders released over those four days had been jailed for selling or having drugs. Block has said he never thought drug offenders should be put on work release and he banned the practice last month, although the department is considering yet another change that would allow the release of first-time drug offenders.

Soon after Block’s briefing, top officials ordered changes in the program, according to the March 14, 1995, memo. Later that same day, the deputy wrote, a jail commander “called back and told me that starting immediately the normal release criteria for Work Release applies.”

But it is still unclear what criteria were supposed to apply--and why staff stopped following them. Those questions are now being explored in an internal investigation into the program’s missteps, custody chief King said in an interview Thursday.

What is clear, however, is that the policy “eroded again” at some point after Block’s 1995 phone call, King said. Routine criminal checks were not being conducted on work-release candidates as recently as two months ago, and serious offenders were getting out.

The Probation Department screenings are aimed at fixing the problem.

Under a draft of the plan circulated at a meeting Tuesday, Sheriff’s Department staff would identify candidates for the program and notify the Probation Department. The candidates could number several hundred a day.

Probation Department staff would interview the inmates, run down their criminal histories and warrants, confirm their names, addresses and other biographical information, and “provide Sheriff with a daily list of inmates approved for program participation, indicating risk level and program assignment,” the draft said.

The Probation Department “has a tried-and-true process” for evaluating an offender’s risk, King said. “We are going to work together and meld together what we are trying to do and what they are doing,” he said.

The Sheriff’s Department would still maintain final say over who gets out on work release.

But the scope of the proposed shift in responsibility from one agency to the other is made clear in a recent memo sent to jail commanders from King’s office.

“We are recommending that the program be moved to the Probation Department,” the internal memo said. The Sheriff’s Department would be responsible for enforcing compliance.

Offley, who is head of adult field services for the Probation Department, said the new alignment will allow his staff to probe areas that have often been left unchecked by the sheriff--including the stability of a work-release candidate’s employment, family and residence ties, along with past criminal activity.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Offley said, sheriff’s officials acknowledged that deputies, unlike probation officers, don’t have the training to evaluate the danger an offender poses to the community, using risk rankings and myriad formulas.

“Basically what [sheriff’s officials] said was that the deputy sheriffs in the jail were corrections officers. They were there to run jails and did not have the qualifications to [determine] people’s risks to the community . . . and that we can do this better,” he said.

Merrick J. Bobb, special counsel for the Sheriff’s Department, said the plan means the department should know more about the type of inmates they are releasing.

“I think the Probation Department has a lot of experience in this area. I’m sure that in time the Sheriff’s Department could develop similar methodology on its own, but given that the methodology is already out there, I don’t see why the Sheriff’s Department should reinvent the wheel,” he said. “Indeed, one thing I like about the department is its willingness to reach out and accept good ideas, whatever the source.”

But as the plan moves toward final review in coming weeks, Offley said he still has concerns that sheriff’s officials, holding the key to the cells, might continue to free “unsuitable” candidates if they run short of jail beds.

“Would they go ahead and release them anyway? Would we be coerced into having to change our risk-assessment [formula]?” he asked. “I don’t know the answer to that, and that’s what worries me.”

Says King: “We’re not going to force them to put out people who don’t meet their criteria.” If beds run short, he said: “We’ll just have to look at other options.”