An Essential Step for the Jails

For years now, attorney Merrick Bobb has had a thankless task. As a special counsel for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Bobb monitors the Sheriff’s Department. He might as well have been in the Angeles National Forest delivering his warnings to the trees. That’s how little has been done about many of the problems he has pointed out.

Fortunately, finally, things are changing. Over the past several months, unprecedented scrutiny has been leveled at the Sheriff’s Department’s many and varied troubles. Surely this time Bobb’s semiannual report to the supervisors--his seventh--won’t fall on inattentive ears.

In a report released Monday, for example, Bobb examines again one critical area that has been discussed many times in recent months. That’s the need for a modernized tracking system that can rapidly account for anyone incarcerated in the county’s criminal justice system. The system would incorporate timely and accurate information from the courts, the district attorney’s office and other pertinent local, state and federal databases.

Such a system would represent an enormous but absolutely necessary achievement, one that could put an end to accidental early or late releases of county jail inmates. It would also help track inmates in the county’s work release program, in which prisoners are allowed to sleep at home.

The database would be an invaluable tool for the expanded electronic monitoring program that Bobb recommends. As another option for nonviolent inmates, electronic monitoring can ease jail overcrowding. It permits inmates to serve their time on the outside, wearing electronic monitors that alert officers if the wearers stray outside established geographic boundaries.

At present, according to the latest Bobb report, the department’s ability to keep track of prisoners is “unraveling faster than it can be fixed.” Although some improvements have been made, such as tightening the work release program, the special counsel says that it is “too early for even guarded optimism” on the department’s prospects for success in monitoring its charges.

The question of costs may be one of the board’s biggest dilemmas here. But the real issue is not whether to make these changes but how to do it quickly, efficiently and effectively.