Lodgings Aren’t Posh, but They Beat County Jail

The 26-year-old Granada Hills man had reserved his lodgings more than a month in advance. He said he “broke his piggy bank” to come up with the $720 in cash to pay for them.

What he received in return was a cell for nine nights and 10 days in the San Fernando City Jail.

The inmate, a convicted drunk driver who asked that his name not be used because he told his employer and friends he was on a ski trip, reasoned that the time he served in the San Fernando jail was well worth the money.

“It’s either this or county,” he said, referring to the mammoth, overcrowded Los Angeles County Jail. “I ain’t gonna stay there if I have a choice. There’s a bunch of crazies down there.”

The man is one of hundreds of misdemeanor offenders, mainly drunk drivers, who pay as much as $80 a day to avoid serving time at the Los Angeles County Jail by participating in alternative incarceration programs at Burbank and San Fernando city jails.

Booked Solid for Weekends

According to police, the demand for cells has become so great that they are booked solid for weekends, the most popular time for reservations.

“Since we started, the only time a bed has not been filled on the weekend is when someone didn’t show up,” said Sgt. Don Rivetti of the San Fernando Police Department. “We generally have a waiting list for weekends six to eight weeks long.”

Under terms of the Burbank and San Fernando programs, a person found guilty of a misdemeanor can request to serve his jail sentence at any facility in the county. The majority opt to serve their sentences in jails near their homes.

If the judge approves the request, a reservation is made with the local jailer and a formal commitment is issued by the court.

State law provides that city and county jails can charge inmates for special types of incarceration, including the so-called weekenders, whose time is served so that regular employment is not interrupted.

The programs in Burbank and San Fernando, two of at least 10 in use throughout Los Angeles County, emerged over the past three years in response to an increase in the number of people sentenced to jail for drunk driving. Tougher laws ordering a 48-hour mandatory sentence for second-time offenders took effect in 1982.

Requests From Lawyers

The stricter laws, coupled with severly overcrowded conditions at County Jail, prompted attorneys representing convicted drunk drivers to ask the courts to commit their clients to smaller and safer city jail facilities, judges and jailers said.

In 1982, four cities in the South Bay area began alternative incarceration programs to accommodate requests for jail space. San Fernando and Burbank began their programs in late 1983 after learning of the success of programs in Redondo Beach, Torrance, Gardena and Hawthorne.

City officials praise the programs for adding tens of thousands of dollars to city coffers. More than $86,000 was added to San Fernando’s general fund in 1984 from the jail program, and Burbank collected $51,000.

“For a small town like San Fernando, this is a significant amount of money,” said City Administrator Donald Penman. “Considering that we faced a $450,000 deficit two years ago, this revenue decreased it by almost 20%.”

At San Fernando jail, inmates are charged $80 a day. At Burbank, the cost is $50. In the County Jail system, inmates serving weekender sentences are charged up to $23.39 a day depending on ability to pay, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said.

San Fernando officials said they based their fee on the $75 charged by the South Bay area city jails. Burbank police said they originally charged $35 a night, but when they were paid $50 a night to temporarily house federal prisoners, they decided to raise their rates.

No State Control on Charges

A spokesman from the state Board of Corrections said that while city jail conditions and operations are regulated, the state has no jurisdiction over what a city can charge for its cell space.

Judges see merit in the programs beyond the small contribution toward alleviating the severely overcrowded conditions at Los Angeles County Jail, where at times misdemeanor offenders have been released because there was no room.

“We know that they are going to serve their time in a jail when they go to Burbank,” said Burbank Municipal Judge C. Bernard Kaufman. “They may get a better meal and have better accommodations, but . . . we know they are in a jail facility.”

“The cost doesn’t seem to deter people,” said Van Nuys Municipal Judge Kenneth L. Chotiner. “It gets expensive and can equal or exceed the fines. Many people will pay almost anything to avoid going to County Jail.”

Chotiner said he stipulated that the San Fernando program provide a bed for indigents who requested to serve time in the jail.

“None of the programs in other cities had provisions for the indigent,” Chotiner said. “I was worried about equal protection and didn’t want the program to be available to only those who could pay.”

Eight beds are available for men in the San Fernando and Burbank jails. Sybil Brand Institute, the main county jail for women, operates a weekender program. At least five other city jails--Redondo Beach, Torrance, Culver City, Hermosa Beach and Pasadena--have separate facilities to handle women on weekend programs.

Police said the program is easy to operate because the people admitted are screened for prior offenses to assure that only nonviolent, low-risk inmates are accepted. Extra personnel are not needed, police said, because the jail is staffed on a round-the-clock basis.

At Los Angeles County Jail, officials said that although drunk drivers and misdemeanor criminals are incarcerated there, in many cases they should not be. Nearly 7,000 inmates, 2,000 more than the facility is designed to handle, are crowded into the seven-acre monolith on Bauchet Street in downtown Los Angeles.

County Jail inmates are classified according to myriad categories such as violent tendencies, mental condition, gang affiliation or of-fense committed, said Capt. Beto R. Kienast, commander of the inmate reception center. They are placed with similar inmates in 250-men cell blocks.

Overcrowding has forced jail officials to put beds in recreation rooms and six and eight beds in cells designed to handle four.

“We don’t have special beds set aside for the weekenders,” Kienast said. “They are put in with the general inmate population. That’s what they don’t like.”

Several inmates in San Fernando termed that city’s facility the “gray-bar hotel” in comparison to Los Angeles County Jail.

“In county, you stay awake for the first 24 hours, constantly watching your back,” said one man who works as a technical illustrator. “I was in this cell--one of the guys wanted to fight me--and it just gets to a point where you are sweating. It must be 110 degrees inside.”

Two San Fernando inmates, who said they had served 48 hours for misdemeanor drug offenses at County Jail, said that it was the grueling booking process at the facility that made them pay for incarceration elsewhere.

The County Jail inmate reception center process between 1,600 and 2,000 inmates a day. Depending on the time of day, the booking process can take as long as eight hours, Kienast said.

“It’s not a nice place. We try and make it humane, but it’s not nice. The people are not nice,” Kienast said. “For someone who is not accustomed to jail, the process is traumatic.”

Wear Their Own Clothes

In Burbank and San Fernando, weekender inmates wear their own clothes and eight men are put in a 12-man cell block. In Burbank, a 13-inch color television set is wheeled into the cell every weekend. In San Fernando, food is prepared by a local coffee shop.

But the conditions are hardly hotel-like.

Thin, lumpy mattresses cover the steel-platform bunk beds that jut out of the walls on each side of the cell. A white toilet bowl sticks out from the middle of the cell’s back wall.

“For $80 a night, in the back of your mind you’re kind of expecting something different,” a Saugus man said. “We didn’t even get a TV on Super Bowl Sunday. It just goes to show that jail is jail.”