Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Peter Pace got a break last week.  You may not have heard of him, even though he is considerably more accomplished and more deserving of the limelight than was Paris Hilton, who was the focus of the day.  While Paris was getting sent back to jail on Friday, it was announced that General Peter Pace, Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, would not be serving a second term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  This news was judged not worthy of interrupting the minute-by-minute reporting of Paris’ hearing.  I don’t know General Pace, and I’m not knowledgeable enough to comment on whether he should or shouldn’t have served another term, but I respect anyone that can rise to that level of command, especially in the Marine Corps.  But in today’s world, he takes a back seat to an underweight rich girl whose most eloquent quote, and description for most everything, is “That’s hot.”

This event will serve as the future standard for “media circus,” and folks are outraged for all sorts of reasons–Paris is being treated too harshly, Paris isn’t being punished enough, celebrities don’t get treated the same, on and on.  Even my old pal Al Sharpton is trying to steal some of the thunder, demanding to meet with Sheriff Lee Baca about the disparity of treatment between convicted drunk drivers with no prior record and gangbanger murderers whose rap sheets begin with “Volume One.” I have not yet heard any protests about how Paris Hilton’s jail sentence is a waste of time and resources, no matter how much she might deserve to be there.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department operates the largest jail system in the world.  On any given day, there are more inmates (20,000+) in LA’s jails than there are in most states’ prison systems.  Most of the people housed there are violent, predicate felons who, if allowed to wander around unsupervised, would be victimizing more citizens, selling more dope, stealing more property, or doing other things that the good folks of LA County have reason to be concerned about.

Paris Hilton’s root offense was drunk driving, followed by an arrest for driving on a suspended license.  Certainly, drunk drivers kill a lot of innocent people, and I don’t favor slacking off on penalties for any of them.  But one has to look at the big picture, and that means that there are more bad guys than there are jail cells.  One has to use the resources they have where they’ll do the most good.  The judge that got his panties in such a knot over her release knows this as well as anyone.  He wanted to show the world that he won’t be hoodwinked by a wealthy blond chick, so he orders a sentence disproportionate to both the crime and the local sentencing standards, and then calls the sheriff on the carpet when he handles that sentence as he would any other.  Check the LA County court records and see how many other drunk driver/driving while suspended offenders with no priors were mandated to spend a month and a half inside.

I’ve visited a number of jails and prisons in my time, and I haven’t been in one of them that made me think, “I wouldn’t mind staying here.”  That’s because even the newer facilities that hadn’t been wrecked or debilitated by their inhabitants are still full of people that I don’t want to be around.  A fair number of inmates are mentally ill, even more are violent predators (and these categories often overlap), and people like me–or, for that matter, Paris Hilton–are more likely to become victims of the rest of the crowd.  To aggravate things, most jails are not new, and suffer from deferred maintenance, continuous damage by angry inmates that will strike out at anything they can, insect and rodent infestation, mold, and other environmental problems that make them even more unpleasant than they were intended to be.

If an inmate gets sick or injured while they are in custody, their care must be provided by the jailers.  If the condition can be managed while the inmate is still in general population, the cost is significant but manageable.  If they have to be placed in a jail ward or a regular hospital, the cost goes up enormously, not only to pay for the caregivers, medical supplies and medicines, but also for the additional security personnel to ensure they do not escape and are not victimized by someone who would be better off if they weren’t around.  Try to imagine the drama that would ensue if Paris was to get stabbed or beaten while in custody, or if she was to contract an illness caused by mold or staph infection.  Then imagine the costs of the ensuing civil actions brought by Paris against the sheriff’s department, who would be happy to correct all of the health and safety problems if they had the money and space to do so.

A county sheriff is generally required to take custody of prisoners sentenced from the courts.  How he maintains that custody is usually up to the sheriff, because very few sheriffs have enough jail capacity to hold everyone for the full duration of their sentences.  Sheriff Baca has to deal with 1,000 new bookings just about every day.  Because his jails have been overcrowded for as long as anyone can remember, he has to let 1,000 inmates go to accommodate the next wave.

As a result, the sheriff devises reduced sentence strategies based on criminal history, likelihood of flight, demonstrated capacity for violence, severity of crime, duration of sentence, special costs of incarceration (e.g. special security, health factors), and other criteria.  Some inmates are released early with no supervision at all.  Others are assigned to electronic monitoring, home confinement, work release, boot camps, honor farms, and other programs that are not so resource-intensive.  Some of these have the advantage of allowing the inmate to actually produce something rather than be a drain on public resources.

Technology permits these programs to be expanded without the addition of supervising personnel.  There are “ankle bracelet” monitoring devices that permit the geographic tracking of offenders and will rat them out if they consume alcohol.  The people doing the monitoring can spend most of their time on the people violating their program agreements, instead of finding out who the violators are.  Widespread deployment of these devices has been limited by their cost, but the cost can be shifted to the offender when they have the resources to pay for them–say, when the offender is a millionaire heiress.

Jails can be used to punish, but we can’t afford that when we need all the space in them to incapacitate predators.  The jail ward bed that Paris Hilton is occupying should be filled by someone who is truly sick and who represents a significant danger to society.  Get Paris out of jail and assign her to clean public toilets in parks and rail stations.  Have her do that for 45 days, confined to her home at night, forbidden to consume alcohol or other recreational drugs, and make her pay for the whole program.  If she violates, tack on another week or so of latrine duty, repeat until done.  Even better, make her pay for the security personnel to hold back the paparazzi, so that she can commune and become one with her long-handled brush.  When this is all done, remind her that anyone who can afford a chauffeur and who still drives drunk and with a suspended license is both too dumb and irresponsible not to be under supervision.  And let the sheriff do the job he was elected to do, without interference.