Ample Grounds for Caution

Crime-fearing residents of Los Angeles County ought to be thrilled to hear that jail inmates here will no longer serve less of their sentences than inmates elsewhere in the nation. They should warm to the idea that more carefully screened nonviolent inmates will be shepherded into electronic monitoring and house confinement, keeping the jails filled with the most violent and incorrigible.

However, county residents have also heard the reasons for healthy skepticism of such a plan. Sheriff Sherman Block’s department has released inmates by accident, kept other inmates too long and presided over a very porous work release program. It allowed thousands of inmates to work and live outside the jail without a cursory review of criminal records, leading to lots of fugitives.

The county Probation Department now screens work release candidate and will do the same for the new electronically monitored offenders. But Probation already has to keep track of 70,000 adults and 20,000 juveniles with fewer than 900 officers. That’s roughly equal to supervising every resident of Santa Monica. Care must be taken to ensure that the Probation Department isn’t further swamped. And the well-identified bloat in other parts of the sheriff’s budget must be quickly turned into more jail beds.

Sheriff Block is also candidate Block now, having announced his reelection campaign team. The Board of Supervisors will have to keep a wary eye to ensure that his department doesn’t rush into another corrections nightmare put in place without adequate safeguards.