Freed Inmates Often Barred by Paperwork

Delighting or enraging a global television audience, British au pair Louise Woodward walked out of a Massachusetts courtroom last week just moments after a judge reduced her second-degree murder conviction to involuntary manslaughter.

Controversial though it was, the swiftness with which Woodward was released after 279 days in jail was not unusual for smaller jurisdictions where jail offi cials hold smaller numbers of inmates, local jail officials said.

But that’s not the kind of treatment prisoners can expect in Los Angeles County jails, home to 22,000 inmates whose comings and goings generate something on the order of 5,000 to 6,000 pieces of paperwork a day.

Rather than an about-face stroll to freedom, an inmate in one of the eight county-run facilities can expect a wait of hours--or days--in a lockup while court orders are processed, depending on the speed of what jailers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department call the “pony express,” complete with Old West-style leather bags.

The movement of inmates in the jail system is controlled by judicial orders that send defendants to jail (remand orders), insist they appear in court (removal orders) or set them free (release orders).

“Those documents tell us to do something with the inmates,” explained Sheriff’s Capt. David R. Betkey, who oversees the Inmate Reception Center. “Without a court order we are helpless to do anything.”

But that can also cause delays.

In the courtroom, a clerk enters the court orders into the TCIS computer, or Trial Courts Information System, which spits out printed copies. The paperwork is then given to the bailiff in charge of the courthouse lockup, who hands it off to the transportation deputy in charge of moving inmates between court and jail.

“They refer to it as the pony express system because they still use large leather bags to deliver those court documents,” Betkey said. “I suppose it’s been in place ever since the first time a court clerk made out a handwritten note to a jailer.”

The bag of court orders is dumped on a big table in the central jail and hand-sorted by clerks, who put that information into a second computer system (AJIS, or Automated Justice Information System) accessible to the Sheriff’s Department.

That entitles the inmate to be separated from those who are jail-bound and given a green wristband indicating he’s a candidate for freedom--but it does not open the door. “That order is good for one release from one case from one court, said Betkey. “It’s not uncommon for our defendants to have multiple cases in multiple courts.” All involved courts must agree to the release.

Despite the involved system, in several highly publicized cases convicted felons--including murderers--were accidentally freed. The department’s efforts to prevent more such embarrassments, combined with the antiquated “pony express,” can slow the release process to a crawl, jailers say.

Part of the solution touted by jail officials is scrapping paperwork altogether. “We’re very close into an interface in which the court clerk can type in the order and then it will come straight across into our computers,” Betkey said.

Still, no matter how much technology is used, managing ever-increasing numbers of inmates is a tall order. The bottom line: “If you’re a small county up north and you have 100 to 1,000 inmates in your county jail it’s much easier to manage,” Betkey said. “Multiply that by thousands and that definitely increases the task of managing the jail inmate population.”

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