Sheriff Bans Drug Offenders From Work-Release System

Sheriff Sherman Block, under fire for the routine release of violent and habitual criminals into a community work program, announced severe new restrictions in the problem-plagued system Tuesday but lashed out at other public officials who he said must share the blame for its troubles.

“I absolutely refuse to continue to take the heat for the failure of the entire [justice] system,” Block said at a hearing before the county Board of Supervisors, as he upbraided both politicians and judges for their roles in the county’s longtime jail overcrowding crisis.

The sheriff maintained that recent controversy over who is getting into the program--and who is skipping out on it--has been overblown. At the same time, however, he disclosed that he is ordering a broad policy change that will ban all drug offenders from the program, which allows convicts to work at community service jobs during the day and spend their nights at home.

The ban could have dramatic implications for the massive jail system because drug dealers and users are the single biggest group of offenders currently in the work-release program. Of about 1,900 convicts on the lam from work release, roughly half had been sentenced on drug charges, according to a study by The Times last month.

Asked how the jail system would accommodate the drug offenders who will now be kept in custody, Block said: “We don’t know. That’s something we’ll have to look at and adjust.”

He suggested that the department may have to further cut the time served behind bars by convicts not allowed out on work release. Most convicts in county custody currently serve about 23% of their sentences.

The sheriff, who announced two weeks ago that he plans to seek reelection next year to his $222,000-a-year position, also faced fresh criticism at the board hearing from the special counsel who has been advising Block’s massive department for the last four years.

Counsel Merrick Bobb said that while the department has made “substantial” strides in its patrol operations and other areas, he has seen little progress in reversing the often-serious problems that have plagued the 20,000-inmate jail system, including the work-release program.

In particular, Bobb said the sheriff and the county must act quickly to fix the “deeply flawed” and paper-driven data system used to classify and manage inmates.

Despite millions spent on computer systems, the department has mistakenly released murder suspects and others repeatedly in recent years, and it has failed to conduct adequate background checks on thousands of inmates set free under the work-release program.

The county is hoping to launch an expensive overhaul of the inmate management system, but Bobb warned that “the county cannot afford to wait five or six years.”

The department, he said, “currently lacks and is unlikely to have at any reasonable time in the near future a comprehensive jail information management and tracking system.”

The board ordered a review Tuesday into ways of developing a better data system for probing the criminal histories of work-release candidates. But that came only after several supervisors voiced frustration over the slow pace of bureaucracy, saying they thought the board had already discussed very similar issues in depth in recent months.

“We keep doing this,” said an exasperated Supervisor Gloria Molina. “It’s happening all over.”

The work-release program came under scrutiny at the hearing after The Times reported massive shortcomings in a program that has freed more than 25,000 inmates in the last two years. The newspaper’s investigation found that the department has routinely freed violent and repeat offenders--some with dozens of convictions--without even a cursory review of their criminal histories. One in three work-release participants has simply skipped out, with 1,915 inmates missing as of last month.

Block said the department is stepping up its efforts to screen inmates before they are put on work release, ensure they report for work and find them if they disappear.

Last week, the department also temporarily stopped freeing newly convicted inmates altogether while it studied the work-release problem. The suspension was expected to last through this week, but Block told reporters after the meeting that he did not know the timing of the effort. Sheriff’s officials then cut off questioning.

Block, who has said his past directives for running the work-release system were ignored by subordinates, told the board that an in-house investigation is underway on what has gone wrong with the program.

With greater scrutiny of the inmates’ criminal histories, Block said, the program can still work. “Work release is not the disaster that it’s been painted to be,” he said, adding that media reports are needlessly “scaring the hell out of the community.”

Casting a wide net of blame, Block said judges should send serious offenders to state prison if they want to ensure that they are locked up. He told the board it also must bear some responsibility for failing to adequately fund the jails, forcing the Sheriff’s Department to shut down three jails in recent years.

“Budget priorities were set by the board which did not include any alleviating of the jail overcrowding crisis,” Block said.

But the sheriff’s own financial priorities have come under close scrutiny recently, as separate reviews by The Times and the state auditor’s office questioned millions of dollars in department payouts. Supervisor Mike Antonovich said Tuesday the work-release controversy underscores the need for more competitive bidding by the sheriff on its purchases and a continued review of car-buying policies in its $1.1-billion budget.

Board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky said: “It makes no sense to point fingers. . . . You can blame judges, you can blame supervisors, you can blame the sheriff. There’s enough blame to go around.”

Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino contributed to this report.