Jails Fill Up, Inmates Pour Out in Capital Region

By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com

Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 7, 2008
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1

In Yolo County, if it’s a question of doing the jail time or paying the fine, they’re taking the 30 days because they know they’ll be free in three.

In Sacramento, the jailers tell the cops to hold off on things like domestic violence sweeps until they know they’ll have enough space to accommodate the spousal abusers.

In Placer County, one of the top early-release jurisdictions in the state, more than 2,000 inmates skated out of jail last year before they served a collective total of 94 years of the time they owed.

In El Dorado County, the jail space shortage is such that even a sentenced felon has a chance to hit the streets before his time is up.

Everywhere you look in the Sacramento area and around the state, county jails are so full that sheriffs are being forced to let inmates out early or to adjust their policies so that they don’t even try to hold their lowest-level miscreants.

Last year in California, the 58 counties released 86,064 convicted inmates from jail before they had completed their sentences, according to California State Sheriffs Association data submitted to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The jails released another 103,859 local inmates before trial because they didn’t have any room.

The problem is twofold: The counties don’t have any money to build new jail space, and most jails operate under court-ordered population caps that restrict how many people they can keep locked up at any given time.

California lawmakers thought they took action last year to stem the releases when they passed Assembly Bill 900. Among its many provisions, the legislation contained nearly $1.2 billion for local jail beds. So far, none of that money has been distributed. Fewer than half the counties in the state even applied for it.

The holdup has resulted from the terms of AB 900 itself. To qualify for the $750 million available in first-round funding on the jail money, counties had to agree to let the state build a “re-entry” mini-prison on their turf. The facilities, housing up to 500 inmates each, would contain a heavy load of rehabilitation programs for prisoners about to parole home. Many counties, including three in the Sacramento region, don’t like the idea of the re-entry prisons within their borders.

State sheriffs’ lobbyist Nick Warner said there has been “a historic distrust” between the prison system and county law enforcement chiefs, mostly over the locals housing state inmates, with the re-entry prisons now adding fuel to that fire.

Warner said the acrimony between the state and the locals has been “well-earned.” He also thinks it’s time they get over it. It’s up to both sides, he said, to work together to solve the early-release crisis at the local level and attain the still-unmet promise of last year’s legislation that ties new prison and jail construction to improved inmate rehabilitation.

“These guys are busting their humps to correct history and develop a better system,” Warner said of the state’s top corrections officials in recent years. “It’s one system (jail and prisons), and they get it. The bad news is that we’ve got jail and local systems that are used to running autonomously. There are hurdles, and we’ve going to have to push through them until we build better facilities and programs.”

Among the Sacramento-area counties, Placer led the way last year by letting out 2,131 sentenced inmates before their time was up. Placer County released another 1,738 pretrial detainees.

Altogether, that amounted to 37 percent of the 10,318 inmates booked into the Placer system, according to figures submitted by the sheriffs to the prison system’s Corrections Standards Authority.

Placer’s early-release percentage was the fourth highest in the state, behind Madera County (58 percent), San Bernardino (55 percent) and San Joaquin (38 percent).

The county applied for $9.4 million in AB 900 money, but missed out because it failed to meet a key term of the legislation’s first-round funding requirement: find a site for a mini-prison.