Electronic monitoring, work furlough suggested to help ease overcrowding
By Tony Biasotti
Ventura County Star
VENTURA COUNTY, Calif. — Crime has dropped significantly in Ventura County over the past 10 years, but the burden on the county jail system hasn’t lightened a bit.
The county Board of Supervisors talked over that and other criminal justice problems on Tuesday during a discussion of jail overcrowding and how to fix it. The county’s two jails have more than 1,700 inmates on an average day, well above their capacity of 1,500.
The county, which is considering expanding its jail on Todd Road between Ventura and Santa Paula, held two hearings earlier this year on how many beds might be needed and how much they might cost. But on Tuesday, it set aside the logistics of the expansion to discuss alternatives to jails, such as electronic monitoring, work furlough programs and drug treatment.
The supervisors heard from a group of criminal justice policy consultants as well as the county’s sheriff and chief probation officer. All of them said alternative programs won’t replace jails and won’t remove the need for a bigger Todd Road Jail, but they could keep it from filling up so fast.
“We’re willing to try and take a look at everything,” Sheriff Bob Brooks said. “There are successful models out there, but they’re not for everybody. They’re limited to people who are motivated to change.”
The models described by Chief Probation Officer Karen Staples and consultants from the firm Crout & Sida include work furlough and work release programs, electronic and satellite monitoring bracelets, drug treatment programs, education and job training. They represent a midway point between incarceration and parole, and they’re typically used for low-risk, nonviolent offenders.
“The thing that works the best is to have a continuum, a plethora of services that are available and to plug people into what they need,” Staples said.
Perhaps the most effective program in use in the state now is something called a “day reporting center,” said Fred Morawcznski, an associate with Crout & Sida and the former chief probation officer in Placer County. Offenders sleep at home but report to the center every day, and all of the programs they need are there, from drug counseling to job training.
“Whereas before you would send them all over the place to different programs, here there’s a high level of supervision and it’s all under one roof,” he said.
Morawcznski said that when the program was implemented in Placer County, more than half of its graduates stayed out of trouble with the law. Typically, two-thirds of criminals will end up re-offending, he said.
Crout & Sida recommended a day reporting center in Ventura County, and Brooks and Staples both said it might work.
The county already has both work release and work furlough programs that keep people out of jail and haven’t endangered the public, Staples said.
In the work furlough program, participants live at a secure facility and leave every day for jobs in the private sector. In work release, they sleep at home and report to jail work crews that do manual labor for government agencies.
The board is expected to return to the jail issue next month, when it begins to debate options for expansion. The expansion plan Brooks favors would add 704 beds and would cost $132 million to build and $31 million per year to finance and operate.
Copyright 2008 Ventura County Star