A Faulty Program Gets a Fix : Sheriff finally clamps down on work-release AWOLs

To its credit, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has done some serious work in recent weeks in rounding up prisoners who had skipped out on its work-release program. That’s the program that had swollen to near uncontrollable levels by late last year. Some prisoners had been allowed to participate without even a cursory review of whether they were flight risks, habitual offenders or hard cases convicted of assault, armed robbery or drug dealing. Those on the lam often committed other crimes.

Now there is positive and encouraging news on how the work-release program might be run in the future. But it all leads back to the overall management question of why this burgeoning problem wasn’t tackled several years ago.

The Sheriff’s Department is moving to relinquish a role that is crucial to the success of any well-run work-release program. While the department would maintain overall authority, the important task of deciding which prisoners go into the program would be turned over to the county Probation Department. This is a reasonable solution, one the county Board of Supervisors should embrace so long as the Probation Department has resources adequate to the task. Moreover, there are signs of basic changes in the program, which currently allows prisoners to spend their nights at home while working for public agencies by day.

“We’re going to look at [the sheriff’s work-release program] from the point of public safety first,” Nelson Offley, a senior Probation Department official, told Times reporters. “I don’t think they 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.”

Sounds good, but there also are indications that higher echelons of the Sheriff’s Department knew in 1995 that the work-release program had these problems, and nothing was done to correct them.

According to records obtained by Times reporters through the California Public Records Act, Sheriff Sherman Block was told that serious criminals were being allowed into the work-release program. Block apparently wanted to know why inmates arrested for robbery and other serious crimes were accepted. But when Times reporters were investigating the program late last year, Block said that he hadn’t realized who was getting out on work-release.

Now, with a work-release program that will hopefully operate in a more traditional manner, county and municipal officials will have to come to grips with the fact that more jail overcrowding may be a likely result. Too bad they weren’t given a two-year head start to look for possible solutions.