DOING TIME IMAGINATION CAN SOLVE L.A. COUNTY'S JAIL PROBLEM.

Byline: Earl Ofari Hutchinson

AMONG his other requests, including a tax hike to fund anti-gang efforts, Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca is also asking for $300 million to fix the county jails.

We shouldn't be surprised. Baca has said all along said that the county supervisors -- and of course, taxpayers -- are going to have to spend big to bring peace to the jails. That's because he's under the gun to do something to stop the mayhem behind bars. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who has his own problems with the state prisons -- as well as the supervisors, the Justice Department, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a federal judge have all chimed in on the sad and sorry state of L.A. County jails.

Riots, dumping thousands of inmates back on the streets, prisoner lawsuits, Draconian budget slashes and gross overcrowding have made L.A. County jails the nation's poster jail system for dysfunctionality.

The issue is not one of money. The supervisors and taxpayers already bankroll the jails to the annual tune of nearly $2 billion. The jail budget has grown 75 percent over the past decade, and there's no end in sight.

This is not the case in some other big-city jail systems. New York City, for instance, has a jail staff of 12,000 to watch over about 15,000 inmates. By contrast, 5,000 deputies and jail personnel keep watch over the more than 20,000 inmates that bulge L.A. County jails. There's money to hire 1,000 more deputies for jail duty, but recruitment is a slow process, and even if the recruits were there, it takes time and resources to train them. During that time, jail staff will continue to shrink due to attrition, reassignment, and burn out. It will be a wash.

The answer is one that the supervisors, Baca and much of the public don't want to hear. And that's that far too many residents are being tossed into the county jails when they don't have to be.

Other cities and counties that have faced jail overcrowding have implemented programs that have reduced the jail numbers without increasing the danger to public safety. They've increased funding for and expanded the use of specialty courts to screen and refer defendants to drug, domestic-violence and mental-health treatment or counseling. They issue citations for a variety of misdemeanor offenses, impose community service and pretrial diversion on offenders. They've increased the use of pre-incarceration probation and bail hearings to determine if an offender who does not pose a flight or public-safety risk can be released.

These aren't bleeding-heart soft-on-crime ploys. In a report on California jail and prison conditions nearly a decade ago, the Little Hoover Commission noted that education, work training, drug-treatment and counseling programs are the best and most cost-effective ways to reduce recidivism rates. California prison officials also concede that the prime cause for the jail overcrowding is the lack of drug and work programs for parolees.

Still, the public horror of dumping thousands of prisoners back on the streets makes officials gun-shy about implementing any reforms that can be misconstrued as coddling criminals. Baca has taken much heat for the prisoner early-release program, and that's unfair. A much closer look at those released show that most were jailed for non violent, misdemeanor offenses.

That's not to say that some of them didn't pose a potential threat to public safety, but the reality is that it's either release them or risk more inmate turmoil, lawsuits and federal tampering with the jails. It's not a choice that Baca and the supervisors want to make. And it's a choice that they wouldn't have to make if they'd aggressively implement the reform programs that other cities and states are using to help people turn their lives around.

For a brief time, that included California state prison officials. Much of the credit for that goes to Schwarzenegger. He recognized the crucial importance of reform programs to reduce prison overcrowding and the high rate of recidivism. One of the first things he did when he took office was publicly pledge to spend more on work and diversion. The first day in office he appointed the reform-minded Roderick Hickman to run the prisons and jump-start the reforms.

But a year later, Hickman was gone, and a report found that the programs were not implemented or drastically scaled back -- and the recidivism rate had soared. Many of those prisoners who are released are from Los Angeles, and when they commit more crimes, they are dumped in the L.A. County jails before being sent back to state prison.

In a report in 2000, the Bureau of Justice warned that the public -- either out of desperation over the surging jail population or wishful thinking about what can end it -- naively assumes that building more jails is the answer to overcrowding. But the bureau flatly said that was a terrible assumption. Legions of criminal-justice experts have also said pretty much the same thing.

Steve Ingley, American Jails Association president, has gone further. He blames the jail crisis on politicians who pass mountains of laws to burnish their tough-on-crime credentials, but refuse to provide the resources to improve the jails. That, or they lack the will and imagination to enact programs that will end overcrowding and jail violence.

But only that sort of will and imagination -- and not the king's ransom that Baca demands -- is the best prescription for L.A. County's ailing jails.

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Photo:

(color) An immate uses a mirror to look outside his cell at the Los Angeles Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

Robyn Beck/Getty Images