Sheriff Limits Inmates in Work-Release System

Sheriff’s officials have temporarily stopped placing newly convicted inmates in the work-release program, giving department trouble-shooters time to overhaul a problem-plagued system that has returned thousands of habitual offenders to the streets without even a cursory review of their criminal histories.

“What we have decided to do is really triage the whole program and find out from a historical perspective what has happened,” custody chief Barry King said in an interview Friday. “We have shut the program down [for new participants] to make sure we have everything in place.”

Department officials apparently stopped placing newly convicted inmates on work release earlier this week. In addition, officials said they are now checking the criminal backgrounds of current participants who are in the community.

The suspension is expected to continue through next week, officials said. For much of the last two years, the department had been putting dozens of inmates daily on the work program, releasing 25,000 convicted criminals in an 18-month period that began in January 1995.

The little-noticed program has come under fire since The Times reported Sunday that the Sheriff’s Department has routinely put criminals with violent and extensive criminal histories to work at public sites, allowing them to serve their court-imposed sentences out of custody as a way of easing overcrowding in the jails. Participants are allowed to spend their nights at home while working for the Sheriff’s Department or other public agencies during the day.

One in three inmates has skipped out on his or her work assignment, sheriff’s officials acknowledge, and nearly 2,000 inmates were reported missing as of earlier this month. The fugitives--some of whom have been missing for more than a year--include criminals convicted of drug dealing, assault, armed robbery and other offenses.

Criminal records of the inmates were rarely checked, and until recently, the Sheriff’s Department made limited efforts to track down the fugitives. Until The Times recently won a public records lawsuit, the Sheriff’s Department and county counsel would not release the names of the fugitives, citing legal concerns over their privacy.

The imbroglio has prompted law enforcement and judicial officials to call for county and state reviews, focusing in part on the sheriff’s broad authority to release inmates from jail. Sheriff Sherman Block is expected to address the Board of Supervisors on the matter Tuesday.

City Atty. James Hahn, whose prosecutors have become increasingly frustrated with the sheriff’s handling of the program, said in an interview Friday that “it’s certainly gratifying that they’ve decided to take this pause and reassess the program.”

But, he added, “we should still go forward in having some kind of legislative hearing. . . . This is an important first step, but we’re going to all have a wait-and-see attitude.”

Hahn said the sheriff should give top priority to ensuring that work release is a benefit for suitable inmates, not merely an automatic mechanism for freeing up jail beds.

“What was unacceptable was that there seemed to be no way of seeing who should get this special program and who shouldn’t,” the city attorney said.

Even one of Block’s most consistent supporters--Supervisor Mike Antonovich--said he wants county staff to study whether the work-release program, which is now run exclusively by the Sheriff’s Department, should be turned over to the county’s Probation Department.

And Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the Sheriff’s Department should concentrate on upgrading its computer systems and doing a better job of screening the inmates who want to go on work release. “There’s an urgency to get it done,” he said.

Block said last week that he had been unaware until recently that the program had been poorly run and that thorough checks were not being undertaken to determine whether an inmate’s crimes should preclude his or her release. The sheriff said that some of his past directives were essentially ignored by those staff members executing the work-release program.

King echoed that theme Friday, saying: “The criteria the sheriff put in place has diminished over a period of time. We are back to that criteria.”

But Block’s explanation on who should be banned from work release--drug dealers, for instance--differs from the department’s official program manual. And the department has declined to provide documentation on any directives and criteria to which Block referred.

Moreover, the sheriff’s insistence that he was unaware of many of the problems in work release until recently were called into question by a report prepared by his own department and the Probation Department six months ago.

The report--bearing Block’s name on the cover--discussed “inappropriately lenient” standards, the violent histories of inmates, and other serious problems in the work-release program. Sheriff’s officials could not say Friday whether Block had read that report.

Custody chief King said he has assigned Lt. Mike Bornman, who for years has investigated some of the most controversial issues within the department, to look into problems in the work-release program.

Considered one of the department’s top sleuths, Bornman recently led a team of investigators that looked into issues ranging from the mistaken release of inmates from County Jail to the alleged CIA connection to crack sales in South-Central Los Angeles.

“We are looking forward to him making significant contributions to fixing the problems in custody,” King said.

But he added that the department’s options are limited by tremendous overcrowding in a 20,000-inmate system that has seen three jails closed in recent years because of budget woes.

Those inmates spending their time behind bars only serve about 23% of their sentences today, and King said placing fewer inmates on work release would mean the department would have to free inmates even more quickly. If judges want to ensure that serious offenders are kept behind bars, he added, they should sentence them to state prison--not county lockup.

“We can only keep so many people in custody,” King said.