This is an e-mail from Lane County Chief Deputy District Attorney Alex Gardner sent to KVAL on Sunday, April 20, 2008

I’m writing to provide more detail on the county funding crisis and it’s impact on public safety. The public is woefully uninformed about this and, frankly, so are most members of the media. It’s a terribly grim picture that’s in the process of getting much worse, but our citizens keep acclimating to each successive phase of collapse, so they’re not noticing how bad it’s become — like the proverbial frog who stays in the pot until cooked, because the temperature increase was so gradual he never noticed.

This is important stuff, as our public safety system has collapsed to the point where it has substantially increased the safety risk to our community.

In her segment on the county jail, Laura Rillos emphasized that the crisis at the county jail is "not set in stone," but for all practical purposes, it is set in stone — and the public needs to understand that. There is no plan to restore public safety for Lane County, as those who have thoroughly examined the problem understand that it’s going to take a lot of money to fix it. Our citizens are unwilling to pass a levy to fund public safety, and they’re prepared to punish politicians who take steps to do so. I’m afraid that creates a balance which virtually guarantees that our public safety plane will be flown into the ground.

Contrary to popular belief, the county problems can’t be solved through better “prioritization.” To demonstrate the error of that complaint, even if every country general fund dollar was spent on the Sheriff’s office, completely collapsing Assessment and Taxation, Elections, Juvenile, Health and Human Services, Administration and the County Commission, Human Resources, Payroll, Building Facilities & Maintenance and the DA’s office, there still wouldn’t be enough money to bring Lane County close to average per-capita police staffing and jail capacity. We’re that far out of balance.     

Remember, 27 years of financial starvation has eroded our public safety system into last place in the USA even with the federal funding intact. Given that, returning federal funding will not fix the problem.

Lane County has the lowest per-capita police officer density in the entire United States, and we’ve been in that position for years. In fact, plenty of our worst public safety horror stories took place between 2002 and 2005, when our system was in terrible shape, but much better than it is today. For example, even then we had people released less than a day after being sentenced to serve six months in jail. Remember the Benitez case? (Husband was released from jail after which he promptly went to the home of his estranged wife and killed her.) That happened when the jail was fully operational and open — and there were dozens of other bad events and hundreds of other close calls during that time, as we had only a quarter of the jail space we needed to function properly. That need, and other similarly severe needs in the public safety system drove the last few pushes for public safety taxes. Since then we’ve suffered a series of revenue reductions that have made it necessary to close more jail beds and rent more space to the federal government. The cut that precipitated your most recent report was necessitated by unexpected reductions in the number of jail beds actually used by the U.S. Marshall, a surprise that was compounded by soaring overtime costs caused by deputies fleeing the sinking county ship.

Over the course of ten years, we’ve gone from over 300 useable jail beds to 240, to 150, to 93 (today) to 27 by July 1. The impact of that erosion has been mitigated somewhat by the sheriff’s decision to put some of the Senate Bill 1145 inmates — state inmates that used to be housed in state prisons — in “alternative” corrections programs, like “day reporting”. (The concept of “alternative programs” could be a whole story in itself, as many of the felons who are legally ‘in custody’ of the sheriff are actually out wandering around the community in, for example, ‘day reporting status’, a “custody-status” which allows sentenced criminals to serve their time free in the community as long as they check in with the jail once per day... We actually had a guy in that status rob a bank...but that’s a story for another day.) The sheriff has been forced to expand such alternative programs, and the rest of the system has been required to make countless other adjustments, most at the expense of community safety, because we lack the capacity to properly handle the crime volume. Examples and details follow.

We need over 1,000 jail beds to function properly. Today we have only 93 beds, and we’re on our way to 27 within the next few months. The best case scenario, one that is unlikely to evolve, requires full federal funding AND a change of heart by the Board of County Commissioners, as they have said that they will not fully restore services even if all the federal funding is renewed for one last year. Even if both those things happen, full restoration to present services would bring us to less than one-tenth of the jail capacity we need: that’s completely dysfunctional. We need a jail that is sized properly for our population and crime rate.

Communities with a very low crime rate can function effectively at close to 1 bed per 400 citizens which is equivalent to the old Oregon Sheriff’s Association estimate of 2.5 beds per 1,000 citizens, but that is the most conservative, optimistic extreme, especially if the community expects truth in sentencing. Looking around the country you’ll find healthy communities tend to average one jail bed for each 300 to 370 citizens. Douglas County (Roseburg) has 287 jail beds for a county of 105,000, a ratio of one jail bed for each 365 citizens. That’s on the lean side, but they’ve withdrawn from SB-1145 participation, so they’re no longer stuck with housing all the state prison inmates in their jail, and they don’t rent their space to the feds either, so they seldom have to release criminals early.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, the home of the "tent city", pink inmate clothing, and the allegedly frugal "Sheriff Joe", they have a corrections capacity of 12,000 inmates, only 9% of whom are held at the tent city. The remaining 91% of their capacity is hard jail beds, many of which are at the new "max" jail facility on 4th Avenue in Phoenix. The population of Maricopa County is 3.7 million. Doing the math, Maricopa County has one jail bed for every 308 citizens -- and they're not stuck with anything like Oregon's burdensome Senate Bill-1145, which forces Lane County to manage a running average of 200 state inmates serving state “prison” sentences of less than a year. Like Douglas County, Maricopa's jail holds primarily their county inmates:  Here’s the crusher: With a population of 339,000 citizens, Lane County’s ratio is 3,656 citizens per jail bed! Seem out of whack?

Turning the equation around the other way, even without considering the additional burden of housing state inmates, to produce the same capacity-to-population ratio found in Maricopa county, Lane County would need a total capacity of 1,161 beds, 1,056 of which (91%) would be hard jail beds, with the remainder in a tent city (or forest work camp). Not surprisingly, that's very close to the 1,100 beds former LCSO corrections Captain Kevin Williams said we needed two years ago. (Williams, now the director of the U of O Department of Public Safety, retired from LAPD where he ran a large correctional facility. He left Lane County after a couple years saying, “The Sheriff is a very fine man, and it has been an honor working for him, but I can not continue to work in a system which is funded and staffed at a level guaranteed to produce failure.”

The reductions in other areas of the public safety system are similarly catastrophic. Laura reported, “The Sheriff may drop from 4 detectives to 2 in July.” That’s news, but the real news is the fact that we’ve only got 4 detectives and we need more like 22 — just a few more than the sheriff had in 1980, when the community had far fewer serious crimes needing investigation. That’s part of the reason we have over 2,000 property crimes that will receive NO response from the Sheriff’s office. He’s simply doesn’t have a deputy to send.

Similarly, the DA is scheduled to drop down to only 17 Deputy DA (prosecutor) positions in the criminal division . The DA has already lost 10 of 11 criminal investigators. Full staffing would be 38 prosecutors, at least, with at least 8 or 10 investigators and a proportionate number of support staff. And so on. Cuts to the DA are particularly devastating to the public safety system, as criminals can not be held in jail on a felony unless the DA brings charges. The DA is also the engine that drives the financial piece of SB-1145: The county gets approximately $10 million per year in state community corrections funding. That funding is apportioned to counties based on the number of offenders being supervised by the county. If the DA doesn’t prosecute felons onto supervision the state financial support for the county drops sharply. Cutting another million dollars in staff from the DA’s budget could cost the county over $7 million per year.

The DA’s office is already reducing jail intake volume in a dozen ways. We’ve reduced filings, cut warrant volume, reduced grand jury, slashed probation violation volume, and reduced the number of felons being brought back to Oregon on our warrants. In early 2001 and 2002, the Lane County Circuit Court was averaging approximately 900 new arrest warrants per month. That number has dropped to about 500. We don’t bring back many criminals arrested out of state, because most of them would be immediately released from our jail anyway, so we’d accomplish little other than pumping more criminals into our community. There’s too many of them already.

Please take a look at the attached document summarizing the public safety collapse. It was written in 2004 and has since been partially updated in 2006 and 2007 as more current statistics became available. It’s still not current, as we’ve had more reductions and some numbers have yet to become available, but the historical context is critical to understanding the collapse.

Just a couple more twists... First, the last time the county suffered severe reductions, in 1981-1982, the Oregon State Police was able to back-fill some of the law enforcement cuts. At the time OSP had 76 troopers stationed in Lane County. Last fall OSP had only 26 here. The legislature’s authorization of 100 new troopers will result in Lane County getting ten or twelve more troops. That amounts to about 12 for Lane County, bringing our trooper staffing up to half of what it was in 1981. The supplemental authorization of another 36 could means another three or four for Lane County and, if they’re able to get them hired, that would put us over half the 1981 staffing, and still well below half of what we need to be average in trooper staffing.

The public is under the impression that Oregon has become a leading incarcerator. We haven’t. We’re 30th out of the 50 states, so we’re in the 40th percentile. I’m not advocating for more prison beds. In fact, if we functioned properly at the local level we’d probably need fewer prison beds. As it is, we regularly send people to prison who might have been managed more efficiently and compassionately at the local level if we had the tools we used to have. For example, in Roseburg, I regularly gave first time felony offenders a chance to recover and move on without a criminal record. In Lane County, since we can’t hold criminals until they’ve been involved in serious crimes, or many less serious felonies, the felons we prosecute are often subject to serious state sentencing provisions before we’ve been able to give them a taste of jail time,  and that’s often what it takes to get their attention and start a little introspection.

Sorry for the long rant. There’s so much to share.

I hope this helps add context.

Give me a call if I can answer questions or provide more data.

Sincerely,

Alex Gardner