Budget cuts are setting convicts free

Every day for the past year, Los Angeles County jail officials, who oversee the largest local jail system in the world, have been releasing prisoners before their sentence is up: as many as 600 in a day, and 47,000 in a year - nearly enough to fill Dodger Stadium.

While the offenders are nonviolent - drunken drivers, shoplifters, car thieves - the early releases have stirred controversy over whether the savings in tax dollars is worth what many see as a threat to public safety. As agencies report drops in violent crime, so-called "quality-of-life" crimes are soaring. To critics, the trend goes hand in hand with weakening deterrence.

The Los Angeles experience, while extreme, indicates a nationwide clash between tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s and budgetary realities of the new millennium:

• In Virginia, the legislature is wrestling with how to get more money for prisons, whose inmate population is currently spilling over into local jails that are 7,000 over capacity.

• Michigan legislators are looking at ways to change sentencing guidelines to avoid similar overcrowding, with 8 in 10 jails over capacity.

• In Missouri, the state supreme court recently ruled that a year-old law passed to ease prison overcrowding and save money by releasing some nonviolent felons applies retroactively as well as to incoming felons.

The collective result: far more burglars and convicted drunken drivers back on the streets than lawmakers bargained for.

In L.A. County, Sheriff Lee Baca says he had hoped the practice would be short term, but now sees no end in sight.

"For misdemeanor offenders our system has come to a grinding halt," says Sheriff Baca. "With thousands being freed after having paid less than 10 percent of their sentence, there simply is no sense of deterrence whatever. This is no way to run a criminal-justice system."

Sharp drops in tax income and resulting budget cuts have hit local law enforcement hard, straining existing personnel and facilities and jeopardizing hard-fought gains in crime from the previous decade. Though budgetary concerns have eased somewhat from recent years, most feel a full recovery to normal numbers of everything from street officers to handcuffs could take as long as 10 years.

But the most visible form of cutbacks in the nation's 3,200 jails are the hundreds of prisoners who are walking out on early release each day. Heading the list is Los Angeles County. Budget cuts in California over the past three years totaled close to $200 million, equal to about 12 percent of the sheriff's department budget this year.

"Los Angeles is the perfect example of the problem hitting every jurisdiction across this country," says Terry Jungel, immediate past president of the National Sheriffs' Executive Directors Committee and current executive director of the Michigan Sheriffs Association.

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