CONTROLLING COUNTY JAIL POPULATIONS:

EXPLORING PROBLEMS & PROSPECTS

SUMMARY REPORT

An Action Research Study

by

The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania

&

Department of Criminal Justice

Temple University

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice

Grant #2004-NIJ-CX-0007

July 2006

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I. CONTEXT AND AIMS OF THE PROJECT

The current report is a summary version of a much more comprehensive final report of

jail population control study by the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania that

began in 2003. The report is based on the second phase of a two-part inquiry that was

prompted by widespread concerns about overcrowding and jail construction pressures voiced

by government and justice professionals throughout the Commonwealth. In response,

members of a CCAP Prison Overcrowding Task Force initiated a collaborative partnership

with researchers from Temple University to conduct a two-part action-research project.

Phase I of the project was funded by the National Institute of Corrections. It included a

statewide survey during 2003 to document the extent of overcrowding and construction

activities in county jails in Pennsylvania. Among other things, the survey confirmed a

widespread and often chronic overcrowding situation across the state, and identified

numerous counties in which respondents saw no relief from current crowding or projected the

onset of overcrowding within the immediate future. A need for action and assistance was

particularly evident in counties reporting actual and/or projected overcrowding and in which

no plans or expectations for construction of additional facilities were reported to be on the

horizon.1

The present report is a product of Phase II of the study which was funded by the

National Institute of Justice. It builds upon the findings of the initial survey by using a number

of information sources to obtain data with which to examine in far greater detail the reasons

and remedies for jail crowding, to provide direct technical assistance to a select number of

counties struggling with jail population control issues, and to explore implications for further

actions by other key stakeholders, especially including CCAP in its role of working to

advance the corrections and justice system interests of its constituents

II. PROJECT METHODS

Working details for the second phase of the project were developed between Temple

researchers and members of a CCAP Overcrowding Task Force over the spring and summer

1 See Harland, A., & Smith, S. Pennsylvania County Prison Survey. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Corrections, Community Corrections Division. Report #03C701 (December, 2003)

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months of 2004. Implemented in September 2004, the study was designed to combine data

obtained from four separate sources:

Intensive Site Visits to Selected PA Counties: This primary, and by far the largest,

component of the project involved a series of 3-day intensive site visits by project staff to 14

counties across the state of Pennsylvania to observe local practices and interview key officials

and review available data on jail populations and the criminal case processing practices

influencing them.

National Institute of Corrections Technical Assistance Reports: This component of the

study involved review of technical assistance reports – prepared between March 2002 through

October 2004 by National Institute of Corrections [NIC] consultants for counties around the

United States experiencing jail crowding problems and requesting assistance through the NIC

technical assistance program. Most of the reports are based on site visits structured and

conducted over comparable time periods and using similar protocols to those employed in the

PA sites visited during the current study. As such, the problems and prospects for dealing with

overcrowding identified in the NIC reports provide a useful national perspective to compare

against the reports generated for the 14 Pennsylvania counties participating in the current

CCAP project.

National Organization of Counties – Best Population Control Practices Survey: In order

to provide further national perspective from a very different angle, this component of the

project focused on identifying examples of "best practices" in the area of jail population

control in counties across the country. Using a computerized data base of the National

Association of Counties in Washington, D.C. on its members in over 2,000 of the nation's

3,066 counties, a brief email survey and telephone follow-on contacts were made to identify

jurisdictions in which any particularly noteworthy jail population control efforts have been

successfully initiated.

Statewide PA Jail Survey: The fourth source of data for the project was a mail survey to the

63 Pennsylvania counties operating their own jails – four others rely on facilities in

neighboring counties. Survey distribution followed the same methodology used in the Phase I

project. Surveys were directed to the wardens with letters to County Commission Chairs

seeking their cooperation in assuring a timely response. The survey was designed primarily to

obtain information about respondents' experiences and opinions concerning the kinds of

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population control problems and approaches identified via the first three components of the

study. In particular, the aim was to use the survey responses to supplement and compare with

the more detailed findings generated from the intensive site visits.

III. EXPLORING POPULATION CONTROL PROBLEMS & PROSPECTS:

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Study design and analysis plans integrating the four related components of the current

project were guided by a conceptual framework in which controlling county jail populations is

seen as a function of factors in two principal overlapping environments in which problems

and prospects for change can be explored2:

Controlling factors in the strategic management and planning [SMP] environment within which county leaders exercise ongoing system-wide oversight and direction over population control problems and prospects. Does the county have the right kind of SMP body/forum? Is it broadly constituted and well run? Do SMP policymakers have access to the kinds of data needed that allow informed decisions to be made about the nature and scope of population control problems and prospects for addressing them?

Controlling factors in the local criminal case processing environment that determine whether offenders are sent to jail and how long they are staying there. Do criminal justice decision-makers give sufficient priority to population control as an ongoing and important goal? Are they making best use of a full array of substantive and procedural sanctioning alternatives? Are there gaps/deficiencies in the county's sanctioning arsenal of alternative sanctioning programs/technologies? Are the most intensive community sanctioning resources being prioritized and focused on offenders otherwise likely to go to jail or who are already incarcerated?

By organizing the results in relation to each of the environments outlined, the

final report of the study is intended to provide a sort of checklist or "population control

assessment inventory" of findings and recommendations against which other researchers,

technical assistance providers, and most importantly, local government and justice system

leaders themselves can assess how well a particular county appears to be tackling the

challenge of jail population control. A central aim is to provide a practical tool for

2 A third important dimension involves controlling factors in the external environment [i.e., beyond the criminal justice system] in the county that might be associated in an indirect way with crime and subsequent jail commitment levels such as unemployment, housing, poverty/income levels, drug and alcohol abuse, school drop-out, and so on. What actions has the county taken or planned – as a general matter or in terms of specific crime-prevention initiatives – to address the "root causes" of the problem? Although discussed in more detail in the full project report, attention in the current summary focuses exclusively on the SMP and criminal case processing factors that are more immediately related to population control and more within the power of local system leaders to control.

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identifying county strengths and weaknesses in relation to the major problems and

prospects for change along each of the major assessment dimensions listed.

IV. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT/PLANNING CAPACITY

SMP FORUM/BODY

Criminal justice experts in the area of jail overcrowding and population control consistently

note that:

• One of the main obstacles to successful population control in many jurisdictions is that not enough leadership time and resources are committed to pursuing it as a strategic management and planning responsibility on an ongoing, system-wide basis

In this context, major findings of the current project include:

• Most counties have not pursued population control problems and prospects for change in an ongoing, coordinated, collaborative, and system-wide way.

• In the vast majority of jurisdictions local officials tend to overestimate the extent to which existing structures are suited to and/or are actually involved in the routine business of tackling population control issues.

• Counties typically fall into one of three categories as to the extent to which any kind of SMP forum exists for examining overcrowding problems:

o By far the most common situation appears to be that there is no adequate forum at all, or that bodies that do exist -- such as the mandatory Prison Boards in Pennsylvania counties -- focus more on internal jail administration and budget concerns and are, in any case, not broadly constituted or research-oriented enough to bring a system-wide information-based perspective to the task.

o A second scenario is that an overcrowding task force or committee has been convened at some point to address an acute problem. Surprisingly, none of the counties participating in the Pennsylvania site visits or responding to the state wide jail survey reported having a current jail crowding task force in operation, although one county indicated that jail population concerns were part of the wider agenda of its Community Corrections Task Force. In counties reporting task force activity in the past, they tend to be viewed as one-time crisis-oriented efforts that did not lead to any standing permanent structure to tackle population control challenges on an ongoing basis. Frequently, local officials have little institutional memory of any major reforms growing out of even relatively recent task force deliberations. Indicative of the relative informality of such efforts and the lack of a systematic, data-driven approach, few or no written records or formal reports are usually generated or kept.

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o A third SMP innovation begun in recent years – to address criminal justice system issues as a whole and for jail population control purposes in particular – has been the development of local Criminal Justice Advisory Committees or Boards [CJAB]. Such boards have received extensive attention at the national level in publications by the National Institute of Corrections, and in Pennsylvania due to the advocacy and funding for them over the last several years by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

• Counties currently fall into 3 general positions with respect to CJABS:

o Slightly less than a third of counties report that they do not have one at all. Among respondents to the state-wide survey, 28 percent fell into this category and two respondents said that they were in the process of forming a board.

o Approximately two thirds of the counties [67 percent] report that they have initiated a CJAB. However, in most cases they do not appear to have played a major SMP role with respect to jail population control. Reasons include less-than-wholehearted support and otherwise poor implementation. Many appear to have been created to respond to PCCD inducements rather than a strongly identified local motivation and exist in name only or meet only very sporadically and infrequently; some have an alternative focus exclusive of jail population control concerns; most lack adequate data access to support their monitoring and planning needs; still others are simply too newly initiated to have had a chance to make much of a difference yet.

o Only a handful of counties appear to have a CJAB in place that is well functioning and working successfully on jail population control issues.

• Almost without exception county representatives and justice officials who learned about the potential role and benefits of a CJAB during the CCAP site visits were extremely enthusiastic and receptive to the idea of starting one or refocusing and redesigning their existing one to serve as the primary forum in which to tackle the jail population control challenge.

• The need for such a forum was thought to be especially vital by officials in some of the smaller counties as a way of getting around the resistance of a particularly change-aversive President Judge. In some counties, for example, even fellow judges made it clear that nothing much could be expected until the current PJ either retired or was replaced. In one of the NIC sites, officials waited almost 2 years for a more open judicial leadership environment before acting upon many of the recommendations of the consultant report

SMP/CJAB INFORMATION SUPPORT PERSONNEL

In addition to operating a general SMP forum such as a CJAB, a more specific

indicator of the importance attached by different counties to jail population control as an

independently critical goal is whether the ability of SMP leaders to plan and monitor

population control initiatives is supported by adequate personnel resources to conceptualize,

design, generate, and present data reports necessary to inform their decisions.

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Unfortunately, the answer in most cases is a resounding "no". More specifically, key

findings in this context include:

• Remarkably, most counties and individual agencies do not have a criminal justice planning office(r) or research and development personnel -- a situation that is virtually unheard of in private sector enterprises with budgets of only a fraction of even the smallest county justice systems.

• Even where competent IT/MIS/research staffs exist and/or participate as CJAB members: o they often have little time for population control or other CJAB assignments

because they are busy handling a variety of technical and information crises in other parts of the justice and governmental systems.

o their effectiveness in the SMP enterprise is limited because their substantive knowledge about the criminal justice process in many instances is negligible.

• Some jurisdictions report success in compensating for the lack of county or justice agency IT/MIS/research resources by:

o including a research professor from a local university as a non-voting member of the CJAB/SMP team

o use volunteer student interns from local social science and business departments, especially when data collection from hard-file sources is required

• Only a very small number of counties have chosen to make an investment in specialized/designated staffing arrangements to support the information needs of county SMP/CJAB leaders or to provide direct ongoing oversight/management of the population control task

o Examples include creation of a completely separate position – a Population Control Specialist/Manager -- or merging responsibility into other duties of existing court and/or correctional staff members or teams.

• No examples were found in which a CJAB had its own designated information support personnel.

SMP DATA NEEDS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS CAPACITY

Whether the need is for routine system-wide monitoring reports, or ad-hoc data to

support planning inquiries focusing on specific parts of the criminal process, a common theme

is that ready access to reliable information is the lifeblood of the CJAB/SMP process. The

strategic planning and management process within which the continuing search for population

control problems and change options is pursued must be supported by accurate data about not

only who is in the jail and for how long, but about all of the multiple stages of the system at

which decisions to admit and release inmates are made, and about the consequences of such

decisions in terms of financial costs, public safety, and compliance with appearance and other

system-imposed expectations.

Whether population control is viewed through the lens of reducing the types of offending and

violation conduct leading to incarceration, or reducing the extent to which criminal justice

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decision-makers choose jail over alternative sanctions, jail inmates can be grouped usefully

into four broad categories within which population control problems and prospects can be

examined:

>Pretrial detainees

>Sentenced inmates

>Probation/parole violators

>Miscellaneous “others” [transfers; detainees for other jurisdictions; non-support; etc.]

Even though information at this broad level of aggregation is obviously only a starting

point, it nevertheless has considerable value as a tool in the population control process. Just

scanning the percentage distribution of defendants admitted/committed in each category, for

example, allows an instant reading on the relative contribution of each of the major groups to

the overall picture. Are detainees the biggest contributor to ADP totals, or sentenced inmates,

or probation/parole violators, etc.?

By monitoring changes over time in these data – and in the more detailed breakdowns

discussed below -- it is possible to see whether planned policy or program initiatives adopted

to reduce commitments or length of stay in one inmate category or another seem to be having

the intended impact. Likewise, changes from month to month can be monitored to detect

unanticipated shifts in the distribution between major inmate groups that might indicate a

problem due to some unplanned change in commitment or length of stay patterns that needs to

be examined.

• Even at this very general level of aggregation, most counties neither routinely report nor can readily access data about basic inmate counts, admission rates, or average length of stay

Despite its utility for the very global purposes just outlined, jail population

information at such a broad level is obviously not detailed enough to identify the many

specific decision-making stages and case-processing paths which determine why inmates in

each of the four major categories are in jail. More detailed information of this latter type is

needed to extend and focus inquiry into problems and prospects for controlling the jail

population. Figure 1, below, presents a more specific breakdown of inmate groups according

to a variety of reasons for being committed to the jail.

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Figure 1. General and Specific Jail Inmate Categories x Basis for Commitment

►A. Pretrial Detainees

1. Committed due to inability to post bail set at preliminary arraignment by magistrate for criminal charges [bail-hold]

2. Committed for failure to appear at magistrate or common pleas hearing [FTA hold] o Committed pending FTA warrant hearing following arrest for failure to appear at

court hearing [FTA warrant hold] o Committed for failure to post bail following FTA warrant hearing [FTA bail hold] o Committed for contempt following FTA warrant/contempt hearing [FTA contempt

hold]

►B. Sentenced offenders

3. Sentenced to jail by magistrate for summary or misdemeanor offense 4. Sentenced to jail by Common Pleas court for new criminal offense

o County sentence [< 2 years max] o State sentence to be served in county jail [> 2 years but < 5 years max]

►C. Probation/Parole Violators

5. Committed for county probation violation o Detained on warrant/detainer pending Gagnon hearing(s) o Revoked and resentenced to jail at Gagnon II hearing

6. Committed for county parole violation o Detained on warrant/detainer pending Gagnon hearing(s) o Revoked and returned to jail to serve “backtime” at GII hearing

7. Committed for state parole violation o Detained on warrant/detainer pending State Parole Board hearing o Revoked and returned to jail to serve “backtime” by State Parole Board

►D. Miscellaneous Commitment Groups

8. Committed by Magistrate for summary sentence default, such as failure to pay fine or complete community service [magistrate sentence default]

9. Committed from SCI for post conviction relief appeals hearings [PCRA returns] 10. Committed as lodgers/renters from other jurisdictions [other counties; federal] 11. Committed for Domestic Relations violation [nonpayment of child support, etc.] 12. Committed for special program failure [e.g. IP/RIP program] 13. Committed pending transfer to other jurisdiction [transfers]

o Detention on warrant from other jurisdictions pending transfer to that jurisdiction o Mental health commitments pending transfer to mental health facility o Sentenced to SCI but held in jail pending transfer to SCI by sheriff

14. Committed for other reasons

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As the breakdown in Figure 1 shows, the paths leading to defendants being jailed are

numerous and varied, probably more so than even most criminal justice professionals tend to

think. Without even going into the commitment rates and length of stay figures associated

with the subcategories in Figure 1, the listing shows at least 14+ distinct inmate groups within

which population problems and prospects can be examined, to identify the main contributors

to the size of the jail population and to explore options to safely reduce it. It is important to

see the picture and monitor data in this level of detail, because the search for ways to control

ADP will point to very different problems and prospects depending upon the specific

commitment path and decision-making authority involved.

Identifying the size of each category isolates those that appear to be contributing the

highest number of inmates and therefore might have the greatest impact on reducing the size

of the jail population if workable approaches to reducing average daily population [ADP]

figures can be identified. Although it will generally pay to prioritize attention to the categories

involving the largest volume of activity at the different stages of the system, however, it must

be remembered that some of the less frequent practices, such as sentencing defendants to

serve state sentences locally, can account for a far higher number of jail-bed days because of

the length of their stay. It is also important to identify and monitor even the smaller-volume

and shorter length-of-stay contributors. As emphasized repeatedly in this report, reducing and

controlling population size will rarely be accomplished by finding one “silver bullet” or

single-factor solution. Rather, it will more often be achieved by making inroads at the margin

by reducing ADP in as many subcategories as possible.

For each of the major inmate categories, the task is to give systematic and ongoing

[re]consideration to the following questions:

>How many defendants are being committed? >What is the ALOS? >Which categories are having the greatest impact on the jail population [ADP] and/or budget? >What substantive and policy/procedural sanctioning approaches is the system currently employing to reduce the rate of commitments and ALOS in each category? >What more could the system be doing to reduce the rate of commitments and ALOS? >What are the key risk/needs characteristics of the defendants in each category that will most likely influence the design and viability of any population control options being contemplated?

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• Almost without exception, sites included in the current study neither routinely generate nor are able to readily estimate inmate totals, admission rates or length of stay data for the kinds of inmate categories listed in Figure 1.

• Information system deficiencies clearly rank among the most widespread and critical impediments to rational evidence based population control progress at the county level.

o Key decision-makers in the SMP/CJAB process are in most instances without ready access to even the most basic data needed to monitor problems and to engage in information-based planning and assessment of population control initiatives

o Data deficiencies range from information about the rates of commitment and length of stay at the jail, risk/needs characteristics of inmates, and which parts of the justice process – such as pretrial detention, sentencing, probation and parole revocations, and miscellaneous other practices such as domestic relations commitments, detaining for transfer to other jurisdictions, and so on -- might be contributing most to the size of the population and/or hold the greatest prospects for change.

When population control options such as alternative sanctioning programs are discussed in

relation to their potential impact on public safety and compliance with justice system

expectations -- as they always should be – SMP leaders are confronted with a particularly

glaring gap in the availability of data needed to allow the system to monitor what are usually

thought to be its most important goals and performance measures. As a result:

• An especially notable information deficiency is the almost complete lack of data in every county on what might be considered the most fundamental "performance measures" in criminal justice – the rates of recidivism and violations of system imposed sanctions

o Very rarely can judges, jails, probation or any other county criminal justice agencies report what the failure rates are for the offenders they release to or supervise in the community – whether in terms of new crimes or violations of system imposed conditions to appear for hearings, pay fines, report for supervision, drug tests, etc.

Concern that the system should do the best job possible to control crime, recidivism,

failure to appear, pay fines, support payments, comply with supervision and reporting

conditions, etc., as it struggles simultaneously to control jail population growth is

understandable and well-placed. It is awkward, however, to profess concern for these goals

while at the same time showing indifference to keeping the statistics necessary to monitor

how well or poorly they are achieved. In the business world [even in far smaller and less

expensive settings than the county justice business] it would be unheard of not to require all

divisions of an organization to keep data on key “performance measures” such as these. In

addition to the basic accountability rationale for doing so, it is also widely believed that

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requiring routine production of performance-measure data serves as an incentive to make sure

that goals are being met -- “if you measure it, it will get done.” This alone may be a reason to

insist on routine reporting of these kinds of data for SMP purposes. What is more certain is

that if agencies do not measure and monitor it, nobody can ever know how well or poorly the

system is doing, or more importantly here, whether a change in incarceration vs alternative

sanctions policy or practice will make things significantly worse or better.

• Principles of evidence-based practice and performance based management that are so widely advocated in the criminal justice literature, especially in probation and corrections, appear to be almost completely-ignored in reality in most counties

Assessing and Improving Information Systems Capacity

One of the first lessons learned by participants in a CJAB/SMP process -- and known

painfully well by criminal justice researchers working in action-research field settings -- is the

realization that:

• Data on even the seemingly most simple case processing and outcome questions are frequently not available or can only be obtained via time consuming and expensive manual data collection efforts.

• Information systems designed primarily to track individual cases, for example, may be extremely ill-equipped to provide the types of aggregate data more often needed for SMP purposes.

• Without exception in the counties visited for the current project, the inadequacy of data from jail and other justice agency computer information systems was seen as the most consistent and pervasive impediment to an evidence-based SMP approach to jail population control. The problem also surfaces routinely in NIC consultant reports prepared for counties in other states.

A bewildering array of agency-specific computer information systems operate in most

counties in the United States. Throughout Pennsylvania, they include local and state police

systems that feed into the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports; the District Justice Courts computer

system and its counterpart in felony court – the Common Pleas Criminal Case Management

System [CPCMS], both designed and maintained by the Administrative Office of the

Pennsylvania Courts [AOPC]; other state systems such as JNET and the family court system

called the PA Child Support Enforcement System [PASCES] for Domestic Relations cases;

and either internally-developed systems or, more often, systems purchased from commercial

vendors for agencies such as prosecutors' offices, probation departments and the jails.

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• Justice system and government officials in most counties are, more often than not, unfamiliar with the many different types of data systems in operation in law enforcement, courts, and correctional agencies, much less their strengths and weaknesses. As a result, there is a tendency for justice system and government leaders to overestimate the availability of key data items at all stages of the criminal process.

• Almost all of the intensive site visits counties and about 4 out of 5 respondents to the statewide survey rely on information systems designed by the Altoona-based company, Digital Systems, Inc. [DSI]. Consequently, the extent to which the DSI jail computer system is able to meet the information needs of SMP/CJAB leaders is a critical concern.

Whether assessed in terms of utility for individual case-management or policy analysis

and planning level decisions, county officials may gauge the adequacy of their information

systems in relation to four key dimensions:

Content – does the system include data fields for all key items of information necessary for planning and monitoring purposes as well as case-processing purposes? Are the necessary items being entered by criminal justice officials at relevant points of contact or are important data fields routinely being left blank due to agency policies and/or data entry resource limitations? Reliability/accuracy – are data entry and error-check protocols adequate to assure that the information stored is reliable? Accessibility – are data stored in a format that permits routine generation of reports and ready query capability and retrieval for analysis by SMP participants and other individual users? Integration/inter-system connectivity – do agency-specific systems “talk” to each other? Can data entered in systems at early stages of the criminal process be electronically transferred to populate fields in systems capturing additional information about the case at later stages? Is single point-of-contact data entry supported?

• The SMP information capabilities in every site visited during the project were severely limited due to extensive shortcomings in county systems on virtually all of the above dimensions.

• The only way most jail officials know how to aggregate much of the data for summary monitoring reports for example, is to go through bulky DSI printouts of daily population listings on an inmate by inmate basis and record the information in hand tallies. Even taking the hours necessary to make manual estimates from these sheets allows only the crudest estimates of inmate groupings, because many coding categories are conflated on the printouts3 or fields are not populated.

Beyond basic counts and length of stay data for inmates, information system

deficiencies and report generating capabilities get worse when questions are raised about

3 E.g., no distinction is usually made between sentenced inmates and "resentenced" probation violators; bail-held vs. failure to appear detainees; probation vs. parole violators; inmates detained pending probation or parole violation hearings vs defendants detained pending criminal prosecution; and a variety of other examples

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more detailed inmate characteristics of relevance to assessing their potential suitability for

alternative sanctions. This includes data such as sentencing guidelines scores or specific

risk/needs items on priors, drug and alcohol or mental health history, or work and residence

information.

• Although at least some basic risk/needs information of this type was maintained in hard files in the jails visited, in no case was it a readily retrievable part of the jail's computer data system.

• Much of the risk/needs information on offenders' employment, criminal priors, or community supervision histories is maintained in probation/parole files, but it is an indicator of the lack of connectivity between jail and court systems that almost half [49 percent] of respondents to the state-wide survey agreed with a statement that "many of the available data fields in the jail system are left blank because the information is in court or probation files that are not part of the jail records."

• Many of the data gaps in jail systems are attributable to the fact that items are simply not entered to begin with.

o Data entry is often assigned to regular correctional officers on duty in the intake area of the jail whose training in the task and broader understanding of the computer systems tend to be negligible. In addition they often plead a lack of time available for more complete data entry because of other supervision and intake duties, and point to the fact that paperwork from committing authorities such as the police, courts and probation containing the information from which data could be coded does not accompany the defendant to jail in many instances.

• In addition to gaps in the content of computer systems due to incomplete data entry, retrieving data that are entered is also a major problem.

• In none of the sites visited were correctional staff able to query the jail computer system to generate any of the kinds of aggregate data discussed in the present report.

The DSI system, for example, uses Crystal Reports software as the means for users to query

the system for any non-standard reports or data requests, and agencies must pay for staff to be

specially trained in its use. Crystal Reports is a powerful but complex program that requires

considerable time to master beyond the very basics even for users with other computer

experience. Among the handful of correctional officers with Crystal Reports training who

were interviewed for the project, most did not have much other computer knowledge and

reported that they had retained very little from the training.

In addition to information from the jail itself, similar reports are essential from every part

of the system. Another indicator of the rigor of a counties SMP/CJAB process is the extent to

which each meeting is informed by routine data reports provided by each participating

agency. Examples of such reports – showing the shared responsibility for jail population

control by agencies across the system -- might include the number and percent of cases

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detained by magistrates at bail hearings; the number and outcome of bail reduction petitions

filed by the public defender; the number and percent sentenced to jail vs. probation vs. state

prison by common pleas judges; the number and outcome of probation and parole revocation

petitions; and so on.

Such regular data reports serve several vital purposes. First, the information they contain

forms a basis for raising issues and stimulating discussion in the meetings if any particular

deviations from expected patterns appear. Second, they supply the basic data from which to

project the potential impact of any contemplated changes in system policies and practices.

Finally, they provide a baseline for monitoring trends over time that allow assessment of

whether any CJAB-initiated changes in practice actually produce their expected impact on the

jail population. As more detail is added to the reports over time, they can be expanded to

provide more case and offender data upon which targeting decisions for population control

proposals can be based.

• With only a very small number of exceptions, it is not the practice of most CJABs for participating agencies to provide standardized statistical reports prior to each meeting, summarizing key activity and performance measures for the agency that relate most directly to jail population control

Thinking about the kinds of routine monitoring data reports that SMP/CJAB

participants should provide in advance of their [usually] monthly meetings draws attention to

yet another indicator of SMP capacity against which counties can measure their own

practices. Does the justice system as a whole or do individual agencies publish formal annual

reports that can be used internally or by the public to monitor activity and outcome

performance trends from year to year? Although introduced here for its role as an SMP tool in

the context of jail population control, such a practice is obviously supported from an

independent concern for accountability to taxpayers by the system as a whole and from one

agency to another.

• Almost none of the counties visited or any of their specific agencies generates and publishes formal annual reports

As noted, the data woes and information-system problems impeding an evidence-

based approach to jail population control planning in most counties do not stop at the doors of

the jail. Indeed, in some cases, especially in counties where the warden was heavily involved

or even a leader in the SMP/CJAB process, the situation was better in the jail than in the court

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systems as a whole or in specific agencies. Of course, some notable exceptions to this

scenario were observed, especially in the occasional probation department headed by a chief

with a strong appreciation for and interest in management and planning data. That aside, the

overall picture of severely data-deficient justice systems painted by interview participants and

from on-site observations is extremely unsettling. Not surprisingly -- but no less troubling --

reports prepared by NIC consultants making similar visits around the country suggest that it is

not exclusively a Pennsylvania problem.

• Complaints about computer information problems were strong and widespread about the inability of different agency systems to "talk to each other", and the resulting inability to share information readily and the necessity for multiple data entry as defendants pass from one part of the system to another.

o Even when departments use systems created by the same company, for example, it is not unusual for them to be based on a modular, agency-specific design, with little or no connectivity to their counterparts in other agencies in the system.

• Particularly consistent complaints were leveled at the two main AOPC systems for the magistrates and common pleas courts

In the case of Common Pleas, the AOPC system is only a recent roll-out in many of the

counties visited, so some of the difficulty was clearly attributable to the uncertainty and

learning-curve associated with such a major change. However, the same cannot be said for the

longstanding magistrates' system, and in any event the thrust of complaints in both instances

follows a similar pattern, most typically to the following refrain:

• The state systems are designed with state interests in mind, dominated by "their" concerns such as payment of financial penalties accruing to the state, more than local system planning needs

• Local systems in place prior to AOPC take-over may have had their problems but they were more useful in many ways for local purposes; we can't afford to maintain two separate systems

• Annual and other routine AOPC reports contain little or no information about the impact of court operations on the jail or other correctional concerns

• AOPC systems allow very little ability for local access and/or analysis, so now we are almost totally dependent upon the state for even the most basic data requests

• Although the two AOPC systems are linked to each other, the information in them is not much help to "front-load" or populate fields in the system at the jail or in other local agencies

AOPC and DSI appear to be the lightning rods for much local frustration, but other

state agencies did not escape criticism entirely. Although only voiced by isolated interview

participants, for example, one concern was that there is comparatively little local-utility

payoff for the time invested in submitting data to state agencies such as the Department of

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Corrections and Board of Probation for "their" annual reports. Related sentiment was also

expressed about sentencing guideline data submitted in recent years to the State Sentencing

Commission which has not published its very useful reports aggregating county sentencing

practices since the last report in 2000.

The inability of local officials to avail themselves readily of planning and management

data needed for agency and system oversight purposes is troubling by itself. Potentially more

troubling, however, is the separate finding that:

• Accompanying the lack of data is a widespread lack of awareness on the part of system leaders of the nature and scope of the problem, a lack of appreciation and/or willful ignorance about the vital importance of monitoring and planning information, and a remarkable tolerance for information-deficient decision-making at both a system oversight/policymaking level and in the context of individual case-processing decisions.

Commissioners interviewed for the project who came from a business background usually

expressed particular dismay over this state of affairs when compared to their experience in the

private sector. To conclude this section on a brighter note, however, justice officials involved

in a CJAB process routinely report that one of the most worthwhile and enlightening aspects

of their participation is a newfound and strongly held appreciation for the value and need for

information-driven decision-making in all aspects of the system.

CRIMINAL CASE PROCESSING POLICIES & PRACTICES

A starting premise pointing to the critical need to understand and assess county

criminal case processing policies and practices is that:

• The most direct and immediate approach to controlling jail commitments and length of stay is for key decision makers at different potential commitment and release points to make greater use of alternative sanctions and or decision-procedures that reduce the system’s reliance on jail as the sanction of choice.

The range of problems and prospects for change within and across the four major

commitment groups – pretrial, sentenced, VOP, and miscellaneous others -- is thoroughly

documented and discussed in the full final project report and is too extensive to do justice to

them all in this summary. Wide variation in existing practices and conditions as well as the

severe data limitations discussed earlier that exist in most counties make it impossible to

know with certainty which specific commitment groups are most problematic or will prove to

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be the most promising categories within which to pursue population control options from one

county to the next. Highlighted findings, however, include:

• Although the proportion of inmates falling into each of the four major groups on any given day varies from one county to the next, there appears to be ample room in the sites included in the study to effect significant reductions in commitments and/or average length of stay in all four categories

Violators of Probation/Parole [VOP inmates]

• Almost without exception in the sites visited, interview participants pointed to the VOP process as posing the single biggest population control problem for the county jail and an area in greater need for change than either pretrial or sentencing practices.

• Defense attorneys, behavioral health professionals, and jail officials in particular often expressed opinions that probation officers in their counties appeared to be driven far more by a 'get tough' policing-orientation than a treatment or service approach to reducing recidivism, resulting in a general disinclination to explore or contemplate substantive and procedural alternatives such as using "graduated sanctions" prior to revocation to jail, and an over-readiness to:

o have defendants committed to jail pending the disposition of VOP charges, o keep them there for extended periods prior to the disposition hearing, o press for jail sentences or full back-time parole revocations at the GII hearing,

o Despite widespread sentiment that the use or expansion of graduated sanctions in VOP cases might have significant population control impact, almost one-third [32 percent] of respondents to the statewide survey said that a graduated sanctions approach before revoking probation or parole was not used in their counties.

• Numbers committed pending and subsequent to VOP court hearings were reported to be a substantial component of ADP in every county visited.

• Delays of weeks and even months between commitment by the probation officer on a VOP warrant/detainer and eventual disposition at a court hearing were not uncommon

• Outcomes of VOP court hearings more often than not were said to involve jail terms, including frequent revocations to serve full back-time almost automatically in the case of county parole violators.

• When local officials were asked which inmates should be released first if an overcrowding court order required immediate population reductions, technical probation and parole violators [TVOP] were identified as the best candidates more often than any other specific category except for inmates committed for non-payment of domestic relations orders.

o The most frequently cited TVOP conduct involved non-compliance with drug or alcohol-related supervision conditions.

• New criminal offense violation conduct [CVOP] was also reported -- although with less assurance -- to involve mainly drug and alcohol-related and theft offenses, which mirrors the types of offenses for which most defendants are under probation or parole supervision in the first place

• Very few probationers in most counties are convicted of serious violent offenses for which alternative sanctions might be most intuitively problematic.

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o According to Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole statistics for 2004, 24 percent of offenders on probation or parole were charged with DUI; 11 percent with drug law violations; and 11 percent with larceny/theft or fraud.

o Over three-quarters of probationers and parolees for whom data were reported to PBPP for 2004 were misdemeanants.

Pretrial Detainees

A second inmate category that contributes substantially to the jail population but also

holds the most promising prospects for reduction in many counties consists of inmates

detained pretrial, either due to inability to post bail at the preliminary arraignment, or because

they have been released on bail but subsequently arrested for failing to appear for a court

hearing. The most salient findings for bail-held inmates include:

• As many as 50% or more of defendants appearing before magistrates at the preliminary arraignment are committed to jail in many counties because they are unable to post the amount of bail imposed

• Significant variation exists within counties as to the bail/detention practices from one magistrate to the next, and officials in almost every county were quick to point to at least one magistrate widely known to be much more likely than his/her colleagues to commit defendants at the preliminary arraignment

• Public defenders report that even very low bail amounts are beyond the resources of many of their indigent clients, so that any cash bail is the equivalent of an outright detention decision

• Although the volume of bail admissions is often high, the average length of stay in many cases is not, because detainees are often released within hours or days of commitment by which time a family member, bondsman, or other 3rd party has been contacted to help the defendant arrange to post the required bail

• Conventional wisdom among jail and court officials is that unless bail-held defendants have been able to secure their release before or at the time of the next hearing – in Pennsylvania usually within 10 days at the preliminary hearing – they are highly likely to be detained for the entire pretrial period, which routinely runs to several months in all but the most exceptional jurisdictions.

• In serious felony cases in which the defendant is facing a longer sentence to a state correctional institution, pretrial detention periods of 9 months to a year or longer are not uncommon.

• Delays resulting in extended periods of pretrial detention are reported to be especially common due to postponements of preliminary hearings due to scheduling conflicts, unavailability of police witnesses, or delays in receiving lab results in drug cases

• Courts typically have no comprehensive policies or procedures in place to reduce the impact of pretrial detention practices on the jail population by expediting the prosecution of cases in which defendants are detained in the jail

• Contrary to the recommendations and standards of major national organizations such as the American Bar Association, National District Attorneys Association, and National Pretrial Services Association

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o money bail rather than non-financial conditions such as ROR or supervised pretrial release is overwhelmingly the most common sanction imposed by preliminary arraignment magistrates

o many counties do not have a pretrial service [PTS] agency to provide information and supervision support to magistrates to increase their ability and willingness to use such non-financial conditions in lieu of committing defendants for inability to post money bail

• Money bail has become somewhat of a "cash-cow" for a sizeable number of jurisdictions in which defendants are charged a percentage of the bail amount – as high as 30% in some cases – as an "administrative fee"

• In counties with pretrial service agencies their impact on diverting cases from pretrial detention is significantly diminished to the extent that:

o Defendants are already detained before PTS intervention because staffing resources and operating procedures limit their ability to conduct interviews and develop non-financial release recommendation before or at the time of the preliminary arraignment

o Whether because of inadequate resources or policy choice, PTS agencies frequently do not aggressively and proactively target cases beyond the most low-risk defendants for diversion to supervised release in lieu of detention for failure to post money bail.

• Judges, jail officials, defense attorneys, probation officials, and even many prosecutors in the counties visited for the current study were firm in the belief that more defendants could be diverted from pretrial detention if resources were available to create or expand the interview and supervision capabilities of a pretrial services agency [whether as an independent department or a sub-unit of probation]

• Bail reduction petitions by public defenders at the time of the preliminary hearing were frequently reported to be perfunctory gestures that are not predicated on collaborative or coordinated efforts with PTS staff and do little to provide the magistrate with new information or release options since the time of the preliminary arraignment

• Bail reduction petitions by public defenders to a common pleas judge appear to be very infrequently filed in most counties

• Neither public defenders nor the magistrates or common pleas courts typically maintain or are able readily to generate statistics on the volume of bail reduction petitions or whether they resulted in release or continued confinement of defendants involved

• In one county in which an individual common pleas judge instituted a practice of openly encouraging bail reduction petitions -- in effect centralizing and standardizing a bail review process -- a high percentage resulted in detainees being released

• In another county bail habeas petitions are heard before a specially appointed "bail master" in order to relieve workloads of common pleas judges and bringing a high level of consistency of standards and procedures to the bail process

• In an effort to decrease the rate of pretrial detention – and simultaneously to reduce transportation costs to and from hearings, facilitate scheduling and availability of attorneys, pretrial services staff, police officers, etc., a small number of counties have either implemented or are actively developing plans to centralize or regionalize the booking/preliminary arraignment and/or preliminary hearing processes

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When attention shifts to pretrial detainees held because of failure to appear for a court

hearing [FTA inmates], findings include:

• Estimates and opinions from court and correctional officials in the counties visited suggest that FTA defendants are not a major part of the jail population control problem in those counties. On-site review of daily population sheets supported this conclusion in the counties involved in the current study.

However, it bears reemphasizing that: • As for almost every other case-processing question, local officials were largely unable to

retrieve aggregate data on the exact extent and impact of FTA problems at different stages of the criminal process from the court or correctional information systems in the counties studied. NIC technical assistance consultants point to similar information gaps in other jurisdictions

• Without knowing how many FTAs are occurring, at what stages of the system, in what kinds of cases, with what impact on jail bed days, and without knowing more about existing practices for assuring appearance and for responding when they do not work, it is difficult to know how much of a problem exists, which change possibilities might have the best prospects for success, or what priority their exploration should be given in the overall SMP search for population control options.

• Considerable variation exists from county to county on how quickly inmates committed on an FTA arrest warrant are scheduled to appear in court. In some counties defendants are scheduled for a warrant rescission hearing within 24 or 48 hours of arrest. In others, defendants may stay in jail until the next scheduled time for the type of hearing they were supposed to attend at the time the FTA occurred. In smaller counties with block calendaring this may mean a far longer stay in jail before the defendant is returned to court.

• Local officials generally express agreement with that an appropriately tasked pretrial supervision program could play an important role in reducing FTA rates and subsequent detentions by

o improving the notice to appear process o giving the court an alternative to detaining defendants on higher bail at the FTA

warrant hearing by providing the option of adding or increasing controls/incentives to appear for subsequent stages of the prosecution on the original offense.

• Counties in which pretrial defendants are supervised by PTS agencies report lower FTA rates which they attribute to being able to institute reminder contacts to assure appearance by defendants whose FTA might otherwise be a result of not receiving or simply forgetting or ignoring initial notices by the court

Sentenced Inmates

Defendants committed to serve sentences in the county jail fall into 2 major categories:

• # Sentenced by magistrates for summary offenses and [in some counties] certain ungraded and level-3 misdemeanors

• # Sentenced by common pleas court for misdemeanor and felony criminal offenses

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Magistrate Sentences

• Aggregate data on the number of offenders sentenced to jail by magistrates each year are not routinely reported at either the state level or in most individual counties in PA.

• Hand tallies of daily jail population sheets and estimates from magistrates and jail officials involved in the current project suggest that inmates sentenced by magistrates are not among the more significant contributors to the jail population in any of the 14 counties visited

Common Pleas Sentences

The "Place of Confinement" Issue

Within the common pleas sentencing population, a very important distinction that

must be made in Pennsylvania is between offenders sentenced to "county time" which is

limited to terms of less that 2 years, and offenders sentenced to "state time" of between 2-5

years. Under a state "place of confinement" law, sentences in this latter category may be

served at the discretion of the sentencing judge in the county jail instead of a state correctional

institution. The population control implications of judges allowing state sentenced offenders

to serve their time in the county jail are dramatic. Assume conservatively, for example, that

the average minimum sentence is at the lowest end of the 2 -5 year range for which state

sentences can be served in the county jail. Under this scenario a commitment rate of only 1

new sentenced case per month, not even factoring in the impact of some percent of parole

failures being revoked to serve their full sentence, means that at least 24 beds will be required

for state-sentenced inmates on any given day. As another way of looking at it, the courts

would have to divert 30 offenders who would otherwise have spent one month in jail in order

to achieve the same savings in jail bed days gained by sending only 1 state-sentenced offender

to an SCI who would otherwise have been allowed to serve a 2½ -4 year sentence in the

county jail [about 900 jail-bed days if released at minimum]. Faced with the foregoing impact

figures:

• Many counties have effectively abandoned the practice of sentencing offenders to serve state sentences locally by adopting informal judicial policies that all defendants who are given 2-5 years of incarceration are to serve their time at a state facility except under the most extraordinary circumstances.

• Judges in a few counties are continuing to use the county jail as the place of confinement for offenders sentence in the 2-5 year state sentence range, usually over the intense objections of jail and county government officials, and with predictably significant impact on the size of the jail population

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County Sentencing Practices

The impact of county sentencing practices on jail populations in the sites visited was

difficult to gauge with precision because of the information system and reporting limitations

already discussed. Highlighted findings include:

• Respondents to the statewide survey were asked to rate sentencing practices in their county in terms of need to change to control the jail population: 50 percent said that the need was either very high [21 percent] or high [29 percent high]. Only 9 percent said the need to change sentencing practices was low or very low, with the remaining 41 percent reporting it as moderate.

• Data in the most recently published PA Sentencing Commission report for the year 2000 show that:

o jail terms were reported in slightly more than 43 percent of all sentences imposed statewide.

o in the 14 sites visited, variation was pronounced – ranging from below 30 percent of all sentences in a couple of counties to over 60 percent in another.

o the number of jail sentences for the year in the 14 sites visited ranged from less than 50 in the smallest county to over 1000 in the largest.

o the statewide average minimum jail term in the Sentencing Commission report was 3.7 months [this is usually the best indicator of average length of stay]

o in the 14 sites visited the mean minimum sentence figures reported were mostly within the 2-4 month range, with a high of almost 5 months to a low of just over 2 months.

o overall figures are heavily influenced by the very high percent of DUI offenders sentenced to jail in Pennsylvania. Because sentences in these cases tend to be shorter on average, they bring down the ALOS for the jail as a whole. Excluding DUI cases, average minimum jail sentences plotted by the Sentencing Commission since the mid-1980's have hovered in the 5-6 months range.

• Applying the 3.7 month average, the result is that a reduction of 100 county jail sentences imposed per year translates into the need for 31 fewer jail beds to accommodate the sentenced inmate population on any give day.

• The prospects for making greater use of alternative sanctions to reduce commitments and average length of stay for county sentenced inmates appears promising to the extent that:

o most are only serving short minimum sentences anyway o the vast majority involve non-violent crimes o courts are legally authorized under the PA sentencing guidelines law to impose

alternative sanctions [IP/RIP] in lieu of jail for most of the offenders currently being given county jail sentences [raising the obvious question of why they are not doing so]

o recidivism rates for offenders being given county jail sentences are unknown in most jurisdictions, so objections to cautious experimentation with alternative processing options on the grounds that they are likely to make matters worse are largely unsubstantiated concerns as long as data showing failure rates after release from jail are not available against which to make comparisons

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• Based upon rough estimates from local county jail sheets and the latest Sentencing Commission data, a very high percent of the cases resulting in county jail sentences appear to involve offenders for whom the state sentencing guidelines authorize the court to impose community based sanctions [IP/RIP] instead

The foregoing findings raise the obvious question of why cases in the alternative

sentencing ranges of the SGL not being disposed of via RS/RIP options other than jail, and

what changes can be made to take greater advantage of the alternative sentencing options

authorized under guidelines law in the future? Two explanations as to why alternative RS/RIP

sanctions are not being imposed are that;

1. There are gaps or deficiencies in the substantive sanctioning options available to sentencing officials in different counties, because they have not been developed at all or have not been adequately supported in terms of staffing or other resources? 2. The rate of alternative sentences is constrained not by the availability and substantive quality of the RS/RIP options on offer, but rather by the sanctioning policies and processes that control when and how they are used. As far as substantive sanctions are concerned: • Counties vary significantly as to the types of sanctions available to sentencing officials,

ranging from a very small minority having almost every programmatic and technological option promoted in the alternatives literature, to others, usually smaller counties, in which only the most basic treatment and supervision options were found.

• Almost every jurisdiction reports widespread use of the standard RS options of restitution, fines and costs, general supervision probation, and community service. Of these basic options, the greatest variation observed is in the area of community service, which is added to virtually every probation term -- and even many jail sentences -- in some jurisdictions but is hardly used at all in others.

• When focus shifts to more intensive/intrusive RIP sanctions, all counties rely to varying degrees on sentences involving mandated treatment for drug and alcohol [D&A] and mental health [MH] problems, via out-patient and, less commonly, residential programs.

o What varies the most in such cases are the procedures for targeting, placing, and monitoring D&A/MH offenders, ranging from full-fledged drug and mental health courts in some counties to leaving it almost entirely up to the public defender and/or probation officer assigned to a particular case in others.

o Many of the counties visited reported a shortage of local placement slots and extensive delays in finding them, especially for residential treatment.

o A consistent and stridently expressed frustration in every county was having more offenders in need of treatment than available funding sources could accommodate.

o An exacerbating factor raised by mental health and correctional officials interviewed is that offenders committed to the jail lose their eligibility for medical assistance coverage for the kinds of treatment that so many of them are believed to need.

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• Electronic monitoring and/or home-confinement were used in every county visited and reported widely among the counties responding to the state-wide survey [87 percent]. However, the number of units and the availability of probation [or pretrial] staff to install them varies significantly.

• More sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance, such as Global Position Satellite [GPS] monitoring and drug/alcohol use detection systems such as SCRAM,4 were far less common

• In terms of more traditional forms of community control/supervision, almost three-quarters [73 percent] of the counties responding to the survey -- but very few of the sites visited – reported some form of Intensive Supervision Probation program.

• The most intensive form of community supervision – day reporting programs – were reported in less that half of the counties surveyed [42 percent] and observed in only one of the counties visited.

• Separate work release [WR] or half-way house [HWH] facilities as a mechanism for reducing crowding in the main jail [as opposed to WR units or wings in the jail itself] were reported by survey respondents in almost half [47 percent] of the counties in Pennsylvania.

• In the site visits, the separate WR facility was a favored population control choice of officials with strong punitive and/or public opinion concerns, who saw it as a way of incarcerating offenders in facilities that are cheaper to build and operate than the main jail. On the continuum of alternative sanctions, however, separate WR/HWH facilities compare in expense to the high costs of jail more than to the generally less expensive community-based options.

• For sanctions at all stages of the process, whether pretrial, sentencing, or VOP – the extent to which particular options are to be found in different counties often seems to be strongly determined by one thing – the energy, creativity and informal initiative exhibited by either a small group of officials or, more usually, a single person. Most typically, this has been a progressive probation chief who has taken the initiative to explore different alternatives, "sell" them to others in the system, and, very importantly, pursue funding support from a variety of federal, state, local and private sources.

As commendable as the efforts of such local entrepreneurs are – and their value to the

counties fortunate to have them cannot be understated – it is obviously not the most stable or

systematic foundation on which to build the system's strategies and resources for sanctioning

criminal defendants. Serendipity and the particular idiosyncrasies of even the best individual

change agents are no substitute for more broad-based assessment and development of

sanctioning resources that can be brought to bear if the initiative and drive of such individuals

is supplemented and supported in the type of ongoing and systematic SMP/CJAB process

discussed earlier in this report.

4 Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor. For information about the technology and endorsements by criminal justice officials around the country, see the product website at http://www.alcoholmonitoring.com

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The fact that counties report using any RS/RIP sanctions says nothing about how they

are used – how extensively, and for what offenders – and especially about the extent to which

they play a role in controlling or contributing to the jail population. Key findings related to

sanctioning policy and process questions include:

• Restorative sanctions of straight probation, restitution, fines and costs, and –especially community service in jurisdictions in which it is a widespread sanction -- appear to be imposed less as an alternative to jail and more as an add-ons for offenders who would most likely not have been sentenced to jail anyway.

If used exclusively or extensively in this "add-on" fashion, not only do such sanctions not

serve to reduce jail populations, but they can add to the problem to the extent that jail may be

imposed as a consequence of offenders' failure to comply.

o The most widespread examples of an RIP-program approach to alternative sentencing are the specialized Drug Courts, DUI Courts, and to a much lesser extent Mental Health Courts implemented in a number of counties across the state. Initiated largely with PCCD and/or direct federal grants, these programs are efforts to overcome the lack of focus and specialized disposition planning that otherwise characterizes the sentencing enterprise in so many jurisdictions.

o Among respondents to the statewide survey almost half of the counties reported some level of Drug Court [44 percent] or DUI Court [45 percent] activity.5 Three counties reported that MH/MR courts were operating or on the drawing board.

o Although highly touted as alternatives to incarceration in many instances, the survey results and on-site observations reveal familiar telltale signs that the intensive and expensive resources of specialized courts are not always being focused and prioritized to target cases likely to produce the greatest possible population control payoff. Rather, they are often reported to be used for low-level defendants who would not otherwise have been sentenced to jail

• Although increasing the range and quality of substantive sanctions is not an unimportant part of the population control task, a bigger impediment to alternative sentencing in most instances [and corresponding prospect for improvement] appears to more that sentencing policies and processes are simply not sufficiently focused or appropriately designed in most counties to allow sentencing officials to make optimal use of the alternative sanctions available to them instead of jail

• Standard operating procedures and agency policies in the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions do not indicate any priority focus on the aggressive pursuit of alternatives to jail sentencing in as many cases as possible

• Few efforts are made to promote and support the kinds of coordinated and collaborative efforts among key agencies necessary to:

o identify likely jail-bound defendants as early as possible in each case and

5 An additional 3 counties said that Mental Health/Retardation Courts were also in operation or being considered.

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o allow time and opportunity for alternative sentencing proposals to be prepared and submitted into the process before the final decision is made.

• In most counties, sentencing outcomes are very heavily influenced if not completely settled in the course of plea negotiations between the defense and prosecuting attorneys.

• Public defender offices in larger jurisdictions such as Philadelphia have established dedicated "defense-based advocacy" [DBA] units with staff from whom defense attorneys may seek investigative and sentence planning assistance in cases in which their clients otherwise appear headed towards an incarceration sentence. Such units essentially provide in-house pre-bargaining/presentence investigations and proposals that attempt to provide reasoned and reasonable alternatives to what is anticipated to be a predisposition towards a jail or prison sentence on the part of the prosecutor and/or the court.

• In the more typical jurisdiction, however, public defenders do not have DBA units and are generally in a disadvantaged position in the negotiation process because they have neither the personal time nor staff resources to develop anything approximating comprehensive alternative sentencing proposals or even shorter sentencing memoranda for the prosecutor's and/or court's consideration.

• Policies and practices in Presentence units in most probation departments are also not very well aligned with alternative sentencing population control goals

o counties vary considerably in the extent to which they even use PSIs, ranging from jurisdictions in which they are requested in almost all common pleas cases, to others in which they are almost never requested at all.

o where presentence reports are prepared, there is considerable variation in the content, especially with respect to whether they contain any proposals or recommendations about the type of sentence indicated on the basis of the officer's analysis of the risk/needs issues raised by the case and offender characteristics documented in the course of the presentence investigation.

o in a very small minority of jurisdictions, probation departments are instructed by the court not to offer any recommendations at all. In such sites, very little use is made of whatever clinical professional training and expertise PSI officers might be able to bring to the sentencing task, and their role becomes instead almost a quasi-clerical function of collecting and summarizing information. In most jurisdictions recommendations by the PSI officer are included in the report, but are not extensively reasoned or detailed beyond such generalities as "within the guidelines range", or "at the lower/upper level of the guidelines range."

o Too frequently, the sentence has already been negotiated before the PSI is ordered, and the eventual report's contents are aimed less to inform the sentencing decision than to provide background information to assist in the intake classification process in whatever correctional agency the defendant is placed. A great deal of time by PSI officers is spent, for example, in preparing reports for cases in which it is known that the defendant will be receiving a long state sentence, so the time and effort invested may assist DOC classification staff at receiving SCI's but has virtually no relevance to local sentencing or correctional decisions.

• In none of the counties in the current study were the resources of a probation PSI unit

specially targeted or prioritized towards providing special alternative sentencing consideration to cases involving defendants otherwise likely to be facing a jail term.

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The situation is no different at other stages of the system, whether pretrial or post-sentencing

in probation and parole. In each case, observations from the current study strongly indicate

that

• At every stage of the system, the biggest impediments to better population control -- and the greatest potential gains if changes can be made – are attributable in large measure to:

o a lack of policy focus and emphasis on the goal of population control o a corresponding procedural failure to process cases in ways that explicitly target

jailed and jail-bound defendants, and align and prioritize system resources towards coordinated and collaborative efforts to minimize the number of commitments and length of stay whenever possible.

In addition to looking at the sentencing process as a "front door" issue as a source of

jail commitments, population control problems and prospects can also be explored at the

"back door" by considering factors that affect the release/length of stay of sentenced inmates.

Findings in this context include:

• Confinement beyond the minimum was reported to be rare in most counties • Some jurisdictions have policy of sentencing orders specifying automatic parole at

minimum to avoid need for a court hearing and to avoid unnecessary jail time due to delays in timely preparation of pre-parole plans

• To allow release prior to the minimum, one option is to authorize jail officials to release all sentenced inmates falling with pre-defined eligibility parameters to serve some portion [e.g., the last 1/3rd ] of their minimum term on electronic home monitoring. Approximately 40 percent of the counties responding to the statewide survey reported using such an option.

• Almost two-thirds of counties have adopted a good time or earned time policy for inmates serving county sentences. A policy of 5 days per month, for example, translates into a saving of two full months of jail-bed days for each 12 month county sentence or parole back-time sentence imposed.

• Participants in the site visit interview process in several counties felt strongly that many if not most of the inmates currently being released from jail on a daily basis to go to work are tying up jail bed space and posing other unnecessary administrative work processing them in and out of the institution, when they could just as well be paroled to electronic monitoring and/or home confinement in the evenings and weekends instead.

• Using a section of the jail as a WR facility, they argued, should be reserved for inmates for whom acceptable home confinement arrangements cannot be arranged. Using a section of the jail as a work release unit is a practice observed in almost all of the sites visited, so the statewide ADP impact of a shift towards the EHM alternative is potentially great

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Population Control and Other System Practices

In addition to the three main target groups for controlling commitments and length of

stay – pretrial detainees, sentenced inmates, and probation/parole violators – a variety of other

categories can also be routinely monitored and examined for their ADP contribution and their

potential role in population control. Although the individual subgroups in this miscellaneous

category are much smaller than either of the "big three", they still warrant attention for two

reasons. First, they often may be the easiest to divert from jail. Second, by achieving small

reductions in each subgroup, the collective population control impact for the miscellaneous

category as a whole might be significant.

Highlighted findings in this context include:

• Among the most frequently identified commitment groups in this “Other Practices” category are inmates who are:

o Committed to jail by a magistrate or common pleas judge for default on financial sentence obligations, such as failure to pay fine or costs or restitution

o Domestic Relations commitments [nonpayment of child support, etc.] o Committed for special program failure [e.g., pretrial supervision program; Drug

Court] o Committed pending transfer on warrant/detainer from another jurisdiction o Mental health commitments pending transfer to mental health facility o State sentence commitments pending transfer to SCI o Returned from SCI for post conviction relief appeals hearings [PCRA returns]

Although none of the sites visited routinely produced reports monitoring the size and length

of stay for inmates in this "other practices" category, the numbers were generally small

enough that estimates could be made from daily population sheets. Coupled with interview

statements about the relative population control importance of different sub-groups, the

following findings emerge:

• Domestic relations non-support commitments appear to top the list in most counties, both in terms of the number of commitments involved and the length of stay.

• Non-support cases were followed in most counties by inmates committed for fines/costs default

• Inmates who are housed contractually as lodgers/renters from other jurisdictions such as a neighboring county or the federal government can be a significant source of revenue to some counties.

o Among respondents to the statewide survey, slightly more than 46 percent reported renting space to other counties, and 39 percent to federal agencies.

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o With only a few very notable exceptions in counties reporting renters in the hundreds, the numbers were typically in the 1-20 range for females and males in each rental category.

o As an indicator of the appeal of rental income, it is not at all uncommon for counties to report a population counts in excess of rated capacity while simultaneously reporting some level of rental activity.

• In both the non-support and fines default cases, local officials expressed strong and widespread sentiment that alternative sanctioning options made much more sense to them than jail

• Domestic relations non-support cases and restitution defaults, for example, were widely viewed by local officials as suitable targets for alternative enforcement strategies to jail to jump-start payment, by sanctions such as imposing community service and/or home confinement or other intensive community penalties and liberty constraints until payment resumes.

• Experience in jurisdictions employing such techniques strongly suggests that recalcitrant debtors often decide that payment is a less painful option than abiding by a curfew or confinement under electronic home monitoring arrest and/or extended hours of community service, say in the publicly humiliating and physically uncomfortable heat of the summer or cold of the winter as part of a highway clean-up crew.

• Similarly broad support was expressed for using community service hours as an alternative by which offenders can “work off” certain unpaid fines and costs instead of doing so on a formula tied to X-dollars per day spent in jail. This was seen as particularly worth exploring in cases involving default on magistrates’ summary sentences in which the questionable practice of making offenders "pay off" the amounts owed at a common rate of $40 per day in jail can have a significant impact on ALOS if the amount of fines/costs is high.

• By far the most frequently mentioned "problem" group in a majority of the counties visited was said to be the inmates given an SCI sentence by the court but waiting in the county jail for transportation to the state by the sheriff. Estimates of the amount of time involved ranged from days to weeks.

Although numbers again tend not to be great in most counties, the concern in each case was

that any unnecessary time spent in the jail between sentencing and SCI transfer for these

inmates was seen as a complete waste of jail resources and that any policies and procedures

that might expedite the process should be thoroughly explored

As far as the second SCI-related "problem group" is concerned

• Although few counties reported a high volume of inmates being returned for post-conviction relief appeals, PCRA returns were nevertheless considered a high priority for alternatives consideration for two reasons

o First, transporting PCRA offenders back and forth between the SCI and the county jail can constitute a significant drain on the budgets and manpower for the county sheriff. One trip to a remote SCI for two deputies, perhaps requiring an overnight

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stay, takes them out of service for local duties, runs up vehicle costs, incurs overtime payments, and so on

o Second, the average length of stay in the jail by PCRA inmates was said to sometimes extend to weeks because of delays in scheduling and preparation prior to the hearings and delay in arranging return transportation back to an SCI after the hearing.

• Inmates detained on warrants from other counties were not reported in large numbers or for extended stays in most sites visited. Moreover, most counties were said to be relatively responsive to requests to remove inmates being detained for them in a timely fashion.

• Finally, none of the sites visited reported "special program failures" as being a major part of the jail population. In jurisdictions in which there were few programs, such as pretrial supervised bail or Drug Courts, or other specialized RIP programs, this is to be expected. In many other sites, however, the extent to which such program failures were contributing uniquely to the level of commitments and ALOS was masked by not distinguishing them from larger groups such as FTA or VOP violators.

Because thinking about developing alternatives and reducing the underlying violation conduct

may obviously benefit from isolating the program conditions under which offenders are

currently failing, and because some of the more resource intensive programs are particularly

expensive to run, keeping track of the commitments in separate program failure categories has

obvious planning and accountability advantages. Doing so will take on added importance if

counties expand the range and number of alternative sanctioning programs available to

sanctioning authorities in the future.

V. RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

POPULATION CONTROL STAKEHOLDERS

As discussion so far shows, the business of jail population control is a complex and

demanding challenge that is unlikely to be met by anything other than the most concerted

effort on the part of leaders at every level of the justice system and government. Results of the

current project show a daunting number of population control problems facing counties

throughout Pennsylvania and across the country. At the same time, the project also reveals a

corresponding range of substantive and process changes that can be contemplated that –

especially when taken together -- strongly suggest that the prospects for successful population

control gains in the near and long-term future are also many and varied.

The chances of achieving such success will depend in large part upon the commitment

of key stakeholders at different levels to rise to the challenge and will no doubt be improved

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to the extent that their efforts are well coordinated and supported by the best available

theoretical reasoning and empirical data. Stakeholders with the most immediate and direct

investment in the goal of jail population control are obviously the government and justice

system officials at the local level in each county. Their road will be easier, however, if it is

also traveled by key external stakeholders at state and national levels, including of course the

most immediately related agencies such as the National Institute of Corrections, and, in

Pennsylvania, the lobbying and other member-assistance arms of CCAP.

IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR COUNTIES

For local stakeholders, principal implications and recommendations from the current

project can be summarized as follows:

A. Strengthen SMP Capacity

A central aim is to create a general environment and specific forum in which county

government and justice and behavioral health system leaders can most effectively apply their

collective expertise and authority to the evaluation of problems and development of prospects

for controlling the local jail population. To begin the process of improving local SMP

capacity:

County leaders should establish or strengthen a strategic management and planning [SMP] body in which to explore ways to safely control the size of the county jail population

More specifically:

Counties should establish or strengthen a Criminal Justice Advisory Board as a high-status permanent SMP body to oversee the ongoing monitoring, planning, and evaluation work needed to address county jail and related criminal justice system problems

In order to launch or maintain the SMP/CJAB process on an orderly and systematic

course, and to rein in the dangerous temptation to try to do too much at once, a further

critically important recommendation at this level is that:

CJAB/SMP population control activities should be guided by an initial and periodically adjusted action agenda -- identifying problem areas and potential change options to be explored, and setting clear priorities for the order in which they are to be addressed

Agenda items and priorities should be established within and between the three levels at which population control strengths and weaknesses can be assessed and

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improved – SMP capacity, criminal case processing policies and practices, and factors related to the external environment

In order to establish a coherent CJAB/SMP agenda for the short-term and intermediate future, the CCAP project's main findings and recommendations discussed in detail in the full final report should be used as a sort of "population control self-assessment inventory" against which decision makers can compare local policies and practices.

• To complete such an exercise, key official must essentially ask themselves "How do we look compared to each of the major findings and recommendations?" – on a scale, for example, of very strong to very weak.

• The results should offer a clear picture of the extent to which there is consensus or disagreement among key local officials members about where major problems might lie, whether gaps between actual vs. recommended practices exist, and, if so, what might be the most promising solutions to explore.

• In addition, the self-assessment comparisons obviously provide a very concrete basis for discussions to set SMP/CJAB agenda items and action priorities.

Without question, the highest priority CJAB/SMP capacity agenda items involve the need to address the information system and support staff problems identified earlier.

In particular, because routine access to data for purposes of planning and monitoring system

performance and the impact of all population control initiatives is the lifeblood of the SMP

process one of the most important and pressing recommendations offered in this report is that:

SMP/CJAB leaders in both county government and the justice system should take immediate steps to engage agency heads and external and local data systems providers and managers – including especially IT/MIS personnel and officials from AOPC, DSI, the Sentencing Commission and private vendors such as DSI-- in a dialogue to assure that:

• The kinds of data reports needed to support the monitoring and planning information needs of key decision-makers in the County’s CJAB/SMP process must be made available on a routine basis as soon as possible

Because implementing and sustaining a successful CJAB/SMP process is itself a

demanding proposition, and in order to take advantage of the high topical interest in CJABs at

the state and national level, a further recommendation is that:

County SMP leaders should seek technical assistance from agencies such as NIC and PCCD along with funding from PCCD to establish a CJAB and/or strengthen its information systems and/or support personnel resources

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B. Strengthen Criminal Case Processing Policies and Practices

As noted earlier, action priorities for exploration of whether and how counties might

exercise greater control over the size of the jail population [ADP] can be set in relation to four

major commitment groups – pretrial detainees, sentenced offenders, probation/parole

violators, and inmates committed for a variety of other reasons such as domestic relations

violators. For each group, attention focuses on what can be done to improve the type and

quality of substantive alternative sanctioning options that key decision-makers might impose

in lieu of jail, and the type and quality of decision policies and processes by which the choice

of jail vs. alternative sanctions is made.

It is organizationally useful to consider population control options in relation to each

inmate group and each of the major stages of the process by which they are committed and

released. However, a major conclusion of the current project is that the greatest operational

efficiencies and outcome gains may be realized by taking a more overarching, system-wide

view of population control problems and, therefore, prospects for change. Indeed, it may be

exactly the failure to think in such terms that is perhaps the single most critical impediment to

rational and effective population control in county justice systems.

Recommendations flowing from a system-wide perspective include:

Counties should explore ways to consolidate/coordinate programs of supervised pretrial release, intensive sentence planning/supervision, and graduated alternatives to VOP revocation

Instead of or in addition to thinking in terms of distinct programs/units programs of supervised pretrial release, intensive sentence planning/supervision, and graduated alternatives to VOP revocation, counties should thoroughly explore the possibility of implementing a system-wide alternative sanctions strategy [or even more concretely, a population control unit]

Such a system-wide population control strategy/unit should be characterized by at least the key following features:

• A shift in thinking to make alternative sanctions the presumptive norm against which the generally more expensive, intrusive, and less constructive option of jail must be justified

• A shared professional commitment to avoiding unnecessary admissions and stays in the county jail is the overriding organizational goal, pursued aggressively and comprehensively across all stages of the system

• Policies, procedures, personnel, and system resources are all coordinated, [re]aligned and [re]allocated ["triaged"] at every stage of the criminal process

to focus them on population control targets over less serious and less problematic cases

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to assure timely and proactive targeting of all actual and likely jail inmates for possible alternative processing

to give sanctioning officials well-informed and reasoned alternative sanctioning choices that they might consider in lieu of jail

In other words, to borrow an adage from the architects, form should follow function. In a

population control context, this means that regardless of the stage in the criminal process, the

main functions are to make available the sanctions that can serve effectively as alternatives to

jail, and to implement policies and processes designed to provide decision makers with the

necessary rules and timely information to choose rationally and responsibly between and

among them. At each stage, the kinds of information, tools, and skills are very similar,

suggesting the promise of significant economy of staffing and technical resources, continuity

of case- and data-management, and consistency of standards if they can be consolidated as

part of a system-wide population control strategy.

A particularly direct and potentially most productive way in which system-wide

population control gains might be achieved is to make it the explicit responsibility of a

designated person or team. To this end, another ambitious but very serious recommendation is

that:

Counties should realign and/or reallocate court and/or correctional staffing resources to find the most locally feasible way of securing the services of a “Jail Population Control Specialist”

Such a position is discussed at length in the full final report of this project, but in brief the

Specialist's case processing role is essentially to monitor all jail admissions and make sure

they are processed as fast as possible to whatever alternative sanctions and decision points

that might expedite their release. To maximize the return on an investment in such a

position/team, however, it can also provide an invaluable service at a policy level as a source

of information support to SMP/CJAB policy leaders. The Specialist role can be usefully

guided by imagining a 'gatekeeper' procedure by which every inmate who is committed –

whether pretrial, at sentencing, for probation/parole violation, or via any of the miscellaneous

other commitment routes discussed earlier -- is immediately assessed, steered towards the

earliest appropriate release route, and connected with the necessary agencies and information

to assure that they get there as quickly and as well prepared as possible.

At a general level, Specialist functions might include:

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• Monitor inmates admitted from all stages of the system on a daily basis and make sure they are steered as fast as possible towards whatever programs or procedures might best expedite their release

• Note any commitments that might have been handled via alternate sanctions bypassing the need for jail commitment entirely. Report results periodically to system leadership for policy review discussion and decisions.

• Liaison with all court and corrections decision-makers involved in any significant way in procedures necessary to make sure that no avoidable delays are experienced in processing inmates as quickly as possible towards the earliest suitable release options

• Information-support resource to system leaders to generate and present data to inform and monitor population control policy decisions

• Liaison with IT/MIS personnel to address data-system deficiencies impeding policy planning and case processing decisions

More specifically, whether assigned to an individual or a team, the central tasks involved

include:

• Screen inmates as soon as they are committed from each of the various commitment routes

• Classify them as to the most likely/appropriate release route • Estimate projected release date based on policy targets set for inmates in each

commitment category. [Policy targets can be established by system leaders and/or the Population Specialist. The goal should be to process each case to release within the shortest time period possible, consistent of course with all due process and legal requirements as to hearings, notices, etc. This can be calculated by factoring in the times between all standard calendared court events, adjusted for any special arrangements designed to expedite processing.]

• Set in motion and follow-up on all necessary contacts, referrals, paperwork, etc. to assure timely processing

• Establish “tickler” system keyed to all key follow-up dates/events • Take action [reminder notice, etc.] if any significant departures from expected process

occur • Maintain aggregate data base to monitor number of inmates; time-to-release – and times to

any key interim actions -- for each commitment/release path. • Flag any significant individual and aggregate departures from policy expectations and

routinely feed information back to system leaders for policy discussion and decisions

Turning to recommendations within different inmate categories, the wide variation in existing

practices and conditions as well as data limitations across counties obviously make it

impossible to know with certainty which specific case processing changes might prove to be

the best change prospects for population control purposes from one county to the next.

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Major recommendations in the pretrial setting include:

Every county should have a pretrial services agency or similar entity Counties should replace the use of money bail whenever possible with non-financial

conditions of release, including varying levels of supervised pretrial release where necessary

It is axiomatic that if money bail is resulting in high rates and/or long periods of

pretrial detention, the most direct population control approach is to stop using money bail

whenever possible. These recommendations have been a longstanding position advocated by

the American Bar Association and other standard setting authorities in the field. Based upon

the findings of the present study, especially observations during intensive site visits, they rank

among the firmest and most important recommendations of the entire project. As such, taking

creative steps to find the resources to overcome the common reaction of "we can't afford it"

becomes a particularly important need. Merging pretrial service functions into existing

probation PSI and supervision units and seeking external funding to defray at least start-up

cost, together with triage/reallocation of local resources are obvious options.

In counties that already have pretrial supervised release programs, a further conclusion

of the current project is that their population control impact in virtually every instance can be

significantly improved by striving to implement the following related recommendations:

Expand eligibility criteria and/or take more vigorously proactive case selection measures to increase number of cases accepted for investigation and report to the courts

Increase the court’s options for release by expanding the range of treatment placements and supervision/surveillance technologies utilized

In cases in which defendants have already been committed for failure to post financial bail, programs should formally coordinate the presentation of supervised release reports/recommendations with the public defender’s office and private attorneys to improve the timeliness and quality of bail reduction petitions (discussed further, below).

Take full advantage of video conferencing technologies to facilitate all aspects of the bail interview and arraignment process [via hookups, for example, between the court, the jail, pretrial services offices, and police stations]

One of the most ambitious but potentially most rewarding recommendations of the project is

that:

Counties should move wherever possible towards implementing central or regional booking and/or arraignment

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This option is compelling from a variety of population control and related angles.

Current practices in Pennsylvania in which bookings, bail hearings and preliminary hearings

are scattered all over the county are very widely recognized as anachronistic and wasteful of

transportation and other resources in addition to contributing to pretrial detention problems.

Centralizing these functions avoids many of these problems by easing scheduling and staff

allocation difficulties, as well as providing a setting in which expensive but critically useful

technologies such as videoconferencing and computerized fingerprinting and photography can

be centrally located and shared.

Until and unless counties move towards replacing money bail with non-financial release

options, the population control role of the defense bar via bail reduction petitions remains

important. To increase the rate of successful bail-reduction petitions, recommendations

include:

Policies and procedures should be developed to promote coordination of public defender efforts with services of a supervised pretrial release program, Jail Population Specialist, and relevant agencies

To support planning estimates and monitoring of any changes made in this area, data on the number of bail-reduction petitions to magistrates and CP judges and whether they result in the inmate’s release should be routinely recorded and reported

For defendants detained at preliminary arraignment for whom pretrial release via any of the

above options cannot be secured, significant population control gains can nevertheless be

achieved by reducing their length of stay via expedited prosecution and disposition of their

cases. Recommendations to this end include:

Counties should systematically and aggressively target defendants being detained pretrial for expedited prosecution and disposition

Targeting for expedited prosecution should focus on defendants who are otherwise most likely to be detained for the entire pretrial period, with particular emphasis on:

• inmates who are most likely to be sentenced to a SCI following conviction/plea • inmates who may eventually be sentenced to participate in drug and

alcohol/mental health programs or other community-based alternatives • inmates who are considered to pose particular medical cost or similar

problems for the jail

Design of a more focused and aggressive expedited prosecution/plea program for pretrial

detainees must obviously address a variety of issues. They include especially ways to

facilitate early discovery, speedy communication between prosecution and defense, fewer

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postponements and continuances of all regularly scheduled proceedings, and flexible

departures from standard scheduling practices to allow expedited processing of the targeted

inmates.

In cases in which defendants are being jailed for failure to appear [FTA detainees],

Counties should develop/enhance options to:

Assure appearance more aggressively -- especially by strengthening policies and processes for staff of pretrial services and public defender offices to remind defendants and their sureties of impending hearings, directions, possible consequences of FTA, etc.

Encourage and facilitate more walk-ins in lieu of arrest following an FTA Expedite scheduling of warrant rescission hearings for inmates admitted to jail as a

result of arrest on an FTA warrant Release more defendants to supervised pretrial release at warrant rescission

hearings as an alternative to higher money bail or jail commitment Expedite resumed prosecution/disposition of inmates admitted or returned to jail

following FT warrant rescission hearings

Major recommendations to control the jail population impact of sentenced inmates include:

To control the level of admissions/commitments at the sentencing stage:

Sentencing policies should be guided by working presumptions that: In cases in which offenders are sentenced to a maximum term of more than 2 years

the "place of confinement" should be presumed to be in the SCI system in all but the most exceptional circumstances

In all cases in which RS/RIP sentences can be imposed as alternatives to jail as authorized by state sentencing guidelines, such sentences should be imposed unless special circumstances can be stated to indicate why a term of incarceration is uniquely to be preferred

The first of these recommendations seeks to eliminate or drastically curtail the fiscally ruinous

and logically almost indefensible practice of allowing state sentenced inmates to serve their

time in the county jail. The second, more challenging recommendation reverses the usual tacit

presumption in that jail is the right course of action in cases in which both jail and alternative

sanctions are authorized under the sentencing guidelines. Instead, given the known human and

fiscal costs of jail sentences vs their almost completely undocumented recidivism value, the

onus is shifted to sentencing officials who are inclined to rely on them to explain why they

fail to impose alternative sanctions in cases in which they are explicitly authorized by law

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Sentencing sanctions should be improved/augmented to allow sentencing officials to choose

from as full a range of high-quality sanctioning alternatives as possible

SMP/CJAB participants and agency/program directors should critically scrutinize all major sanctioning options already in use in the county to see whether and how they may be enhanced, refocused, and supplemented to play a more efficient and effective population control role

Gaps and weaknesses in the county's arsenal of IP/probation sanctioning alternatives should be systematically remedied via internal resource [re]allocation strategies, fee assessments, and aggressive pursuit of external funding from federal, state, and private corporate/foundation sources

Probation supervision resources, in particular, should be realigned and reallocated or supplemented to give priority to implementation and enforcement of intensively supervised alternative sanctioning options for cases otherwise facing high likelihood of a jail sentence (or revocation to such a sentence)

Probation supervision resources in most counties are spread thinly across a very broad range

of offenders, with a very heavy emphasis on low-level misdemeanor cases that receive very

little supervision or service and do not pose much concern from a jail population control

perspective. The correctional evaluation literature overwhelmingly suggests that a better use

of these and other scarce treatment and supervision resources is to adopt a "triage" approach

and prioritize their use for defendants in more serious cases who are otherwise more likely to

go to jail.

Special attention should be paid to developing and enhancing sanctions (or, more realistically, combinations of sanctions) most likely to stand as credible jail alternatives, particularly in terms of their value/equivalency as:

• Control/surveillance sanctions -- special consideration should be given here to the expanded use of intensive supervision probation; day reporting; home confinement/curfew and electronic monitoring (standard EM, global position satellite); drug and alcohol testing/monitoring (especially via advanced technologies such as SCRAM and DUI interlock systems); and community service (especially in work-crews or in other settings with high levels of on –site supervision built in)

• Treatment/reform sanctions – most obvious priorities here include residential and community-based drug and alcohol treatment placements; mental health resources; employment/vocational/life-skills training; educational programs

• Punitive and reparative sanctions – [day] fines; restitution; costs; fees; community service

A special note must be added about the broad support in most jurisdictions for increasing the

availability and use of drug and alcohol and mental health treatment programs, whether as an

alternative to jail or simply as an add-on to probation. The general literature is increasingly

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providing support for certain types of intervention in certain types of cases, and most

practitioners "know" from experience that the impact of D&A/MH problems on the criminal

justice system is unquestionably large. However, continued or expanded legislative support

and funding is likely to be jeopardized in the future to the extent that counties cannot show

data to show either how many offenders/inmates have serious substance abuse/MH problems

of varying types and degrees, how many are involved in different kinds treatment programs;

and, critically, with what kinds of empirically documented results in terms of treatment

success and subsequent reoffending. Given the tremendously high cost of substance abuse and

mental health treatment in many instances, long term credibility and requests for support can

only be earned if system leaders insist on greater levels of monitoring and evaluation data to

justify continued reliance on any particular form of treatment or service provider.

In particular, because Drug Court and DUI Court funding has been more forthcoming

from federal and state sources than for most other treatment options, they have become the

programs-du-jour in numerous counties. To the extent that this has meant more funding to pay

for drug and alcohol treatment services, it is a welcome development. However, it should be

noted that expert opinion is still very mixed about the extent to which any recidivism benefits

of specialized courts are attributable to the specific procedures they typically follow,

especially heavy involvement of the judge, vs. the drug treatment resources that such

programs are more likely to access. From a population control standpoint, justifying the

significant costs and judicial time involved in such specialized courts becomes more

problematic if they are not exclusively or at least very heavily focused on otherwise jail-

bound cases.

Sentencing procedures should be modified to promote:

• Early screening mechanisms should be implemented to flag all cases in which a jail sentence is likely unless appropriate alternative sanctioning options can be developed

• In cases in which a jail sentence seems otherwise likely, well reasoned and documented alternative sentencing proposals should be developed for presentation to the prosecutor and/or sentencing court prior to final disposition

• Alternative sentence proposals should be developed by staff who are specially trained in case-specific sentence planning in the presentence investigation [PSI] units of probation departments and/or sentencing advocacy units in the public defender's office

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• Policies, procedures, and resources within PSI units and/or defender's offices should be [re]focused/[re]aligned to give priority to sentence plan development in cases otherwise likely to receive a jail sentence

• Sentence planning efforts should be well coordinated with the correspondingly [re]aligned and [re]focused supervision resources of the probation department and treatment industry

In each case, the aim is to enhance the public defender's ability to represent defendants

effectively and credibly in the sentencing phase of proceedings, and to give the court what is

essentially a "sentencing support service" that provides thorough information and well-

reasoned proposals about alternative sanctioning choices in many of the kinds of cases

currently resulting in jail sentences. Ideally, such a service would be designed to operate as

part of a system-wide and integrated jail alternative sanctions strategy intended to fulfill

similar functions at the pretrial and VOP stages of the criminal process. To increase the

objectivity and quality of decisions at every stage:

Alternative sanctioning decisions should be guided by the using the best available risk/needs assessment instruments and practices in the field

When offenders are sentenced to jail, main options for controlling length of stay include:

A "population control specialist" and/or the institutional probation/parole office should review all cases at the time of sentence commitment to assure early release planning and timely and well-structured parole at minimum release date

Counties should experiment with early release programs such as: Case-specific development of early parole-release proposals for selected low-

risk/stakes inmates serving longer county sentences Sentencing orders in specified categories of cases authorizing automatic

release to a transitional period of home confinement/electronic monitoring supervision at a fixed time prior to traditional parole release date [e.g., at 1/3 or 1/2 minimum]

Counties should apply a good-time/earned-time reduction of a specified number of days [5-6 is common] for every month of sentence served without violation of institutional rules and regulations

Population Control & Violation of Probation/Parole Practices

As with the other stages of the criminal process, options for controlling the impact of

VOP practices on jail populations can be divided into controlling commitments and

controlling length of stay. VOP practices are so often and strongly brought into question and

identified as the major contributor to jail populations by the site interviews and other findings

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of the current project, that it is imperative that all probation department and court policies,

procedures, and resources should be highly focused on population control options in both

categories.

Controlling Commitments: The most fundamental way of controlling the number of VOP

commitments is obviously by reducing the incidence of the underlying conduct for which

probation or parole officers are filing for revocation in the first place. Many of the

recommendations for enhancing sentencing sanctions and procedures overlap with this

concern. In order for probation agencies to further explore ways to modify sentencing and

supervision practices to reduce violations, however, they must obviously do a better job of

being able to report data on the most common VOP activity in categories that are

meaningfully different for purposes of impact measurement and alternatives planning.

When violations occur, recommendations for controlling commitments – and length of

stay -- largely parallel the ones offered in the preceding section of the report for strengthening

sentencing policy, sanctioning options, and procedures. Additional recommendations specific

to the VOP context include:

When probationers/parolees are arrested for a new offense, any departmental policies favoring the lodging of automatic detainers should be reevaluated

• Decisions whether to release or detain probationers arrested for a new offense should instead be made whenever possible as part of a total pretrial services assessment

• The new charge(s) and the defendant's probation/parole status – including information about good/bad performance under supervision prior to the new arrest – should be considered concurrently, and the results should be factored into decisions about whether to detain or release the defendant on bail or other conditions such as intensified supervision by the probation department

Probation departments should make every effort to use summonses and/or intensified supervision in lieu of arrest/detention to assure appearance at Gagnon hearings for technical VOP charges

VOP sanctions and procedures should be [re]focused and [re]aligned to assure that: o no reasonable alternatives have been overlooked before deciding to commit

probation/parole violators to jail o probation departments and Gagnon decision-makers may choose from as full

a range of high-quality graduated sanctions as possible before resorting to arrest/detention and revocation to jail including:

o escalated levels of community control such as house arrest, curfew, day reporting, electronic monitoring, more frequent reporting/drug testing

o additional or intensified treatment requirements o penalties for VOP conduct such as community service and fines

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Alternative sanctions planning personnel in the PSI unit and/or the public defender's office should be mobilized whenever possible to develop alternative disposition assessments/proposals for cases in which the probation officer is contemplating a jail outcome at the Gagnon II disposition hearing

Controlling Length of Stay: Efforts in this context can focus separately on inmates held during

the pre-Gagnon detention stages of VOP proceedings and upon inmates revoked to serve time

in jail at the Gagnon II disposition hearing. Recommendations here again obviously overlap in

many respects with those aimed at controlling length of stay at the time of original sentencing.

Residual VOP-specific recommendations include:

Counties should prioritize and expedite scheduling for inmates held pending GI and GII hearings to reduce pre-disposition detention time

Any court and probation department policies favoring routine imposition of full back time on parole violators should be reevaluated

• For obvious population control reasons and to allow at least some transitional period of community supervision when they are re-released, revocation orders for parole violators should be framed whenever possible so as to allow the possibility of re-parole at some point prior to the maximum sentence date6

Jail officials should apply the same good-time calculations used in county sentenced cases to inmates revoked from probation or parole

Population Control & Other System Practices

In addition to the usual exhortation to maintain basic commitment and length of stay

data on each of the inmate sub-groups comprising this "other" category, the only specific

recommendations made in this area reflect and respond almost exactly to the concerns and

suggestions voiced by site visit interview participants. First, there was notably consistent

sentiment that population control changes in this category should focus first and foremost on

reducing commitments for non-payment of a variety of financial defaults, especially in

domestic relations cases.

In cases in which offenders are in willful default on domestic relations support and criminal restitution orders, courts should experiment with sanctions that are less costly than jail but that may be equally or more effective as a way of inducing offenders to pay

• Specifically, before deciding to sending violators to jail, courts should impose significant restrictions on their freedom/lifestyles – such as house arrest and other limits on movement/association – and require them to perform full-time

6 Options include revocation orders to serve "a minimum of X to the balance of the maximum" or for a fixed number weeks/months shorter than the full time remaining to the original maximum sentence date.

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unpaid community service labor until and unless they decide that paying what they owe is a less unpleasant and onerous option

In cases in which offenders are in default on financial obligations to the state rather than to an individual victim, courts should require violators to “work off” unpaid fines, fees and costs by performing an equivalent amount of community service work in lieu of being committed to jail

• This option should be used especially as an alternative to what seems to be an infrequent but doubly unproductive practice in some counties; i.e., sending defendants to jail for non-payment of fines and costs imposed by a magistrate, and simultaneously incurring the cost of their confinement while forfeiting the amount owed by crediting them with $40 off for each day served in jail

The only remaining recommendations in this section relate to two additional inmate

groups in the "other practices" categories that were raised during site visit interviews more

because of the transportation difficulties they cause than because of their impact on the jail

population.

To control the impact of PCRA cases on the jail population and on sheriff transportation costs:

• Courts should exercise rigorous standards of review to minimize the number of cases in which SCI inmates are brought back to the county for frivolous post conviction relief appeals

• County officials should seek DOC cooperation and assistance in making the necessary arrangements to allow preparatory interviews and hearings in such cases to be handled wherever possible via videoconferencing between the SCI and the county courthouse

• When post conviction relief cases are handled locally, hearings should be scheduled as close as possible to the date on which offenders are brought in from the SCI to minimize pre-hearing jail time, and return transport should be scheduled as soon as possible after the case is decided to minimize time spent in the jail after the hearing is over

To control the time spent in the jail by state-sentenced offenders awaiting transfer to

an SCI by the sheriff • All processing steps needed to be completed in order for the sheriff to effect

the transfer should be clearly identified and understood • All agencies involved should work individually and collaboratively to assure

that the process is as streamlined it can be and that each agency completes its part as expeditiously as possible

• This might include, for example, transmittal of documentation from the sentencing court to the clerk of court; preparation of transfer papers by the clerk's office; transmittal to the jail and sheriff; scheduling a transfer date with DOC on which sheriff's deputies will be available to transport the offender; preparation of any additional jail documentation and completing the physical release of the inmate by jail officials to sheriffs' deputies

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IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CCAP AND OTHER

STAKEHOLDERS

Jail population control is a task that falls primarily upon the shoulders of local county

justice officials and government leaders. However, it is clear from the current project that

prospects for success are likely to be improved significantly -- and in some instances will

almost completely depend upon -- the assistance and intervention of other governmental and

private sector allies. Just as a critical factor within counties is the need for a coordinated and

collaborative approach to population control, the same imperative applies between counties

and external stakeholders. Facilitating communication of ideas and joint actions between

counties and wide variety of other governmental and private sector parties is one of the most

important ways in which CCAP can build upon the current project. It is ideally situated to

play such a role because of the statewide distribution of its member commissioners, its

extensive network of political and professional ties at all levels of government, and because of

the ongoing commitment of the organization as a whole and special groups such as its Courts

and Corrections Committee to assisting counties on a variety of criminal justice fronts.

Areas in which counties can benefit from external assistance as well as the

stakeholders whose involvement might most profitably be secured are summarized below.

Setting priorities among them for CCAP action is a matter for determination by members of

the Jail Task Force that initiated the current project, and should obviously be significantly

informed by feedback from the counties to the current report and the more extensive final

project report on which it is based.

CJAB Development and Enhancement

The most compelling county need in this area is for either start-up or improvement

help in terms of both technical assistance and funding. Funding priorities include personnel

needs for facilitation and research support purposes, with particular consideration to the SMP

benefits of the jail population control specialist role recommended here and discussed at

length in the full project report. PCCD is already heavily invested in the CJAB area but there

is an opportunity for NIC to play an important secondary role by incorporating CJAB

expertise into future responses to counties requesting technical assistance to deal with

population control issues. Potential CCAP activities include further consultation with PCCD

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and NIC representatives to encourage their expanded support for counties in this area and to

discuss ways in which CCAP might be of assistance. The most obvious candidates include

lobbying at both the state and federal level for funding support, and advising and encouraging

county commissioners to pursue whatever funding opportunities ensue.

Information System Improvements

A priority need in this category is to promote and coordinate dialogue between county

officials and all relevant information system managers and providers to assure that the kinds

of data problems [content; reliability; access/query capability; integration] identified in the

current project are remedied, and that counties will have routine access to the kinds of

monitoring, planning, and performance measure data reports needed to support the

SMP.CJAB process as soon as possible. One scenario might be a CCAP/PCCD project built

around a series of problem-clarification, brainstorming, and strategy development sessions

involving officials from selected counties and key representatives from relevant government

and private agencies. A central aim of such a project would be to identify a plan of action and

related funding needs which would obviously greatly strengthen any subsequent CCAP efforts

to lobby legislators for budget support for information system improvements.

Key participants in discussions of improving report generation capacity at the local

level are commissioners, justice system leaders, and IT/MIS managers at the county level,

along with the main information system providers -- AOPC [magistrate and common pleas

systems] and DSI [jail systems]. Because a related topic of discussion should be to make

statewide and national reporting systems more relevant and responsive to local SMP

population control interests, however, other participants might include BJS, the Sentencing

Commission, the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, and the Department of

Corrections.

An important sub-set of issues for improving the data situation at the county level

involves information pertinent to monitoring and planning for defendants with drug and

alcohol problems. To lobby effectively for greater funding to support treatment and other

program resources in this area, much better data are needed to document the nature and extent

of the problem among jail inmates and other criminal justice populations, and the results of

past investments in treatment and control programs. Consequently, efforts to improve

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information systems for population control purposes – especially to assure capacity to monitor

the impact of recent changes in drug and DUI laws -- should be closely coordinated with

related efforts to assure sound information for D&A [and mental health] planning purposes

also. PCCD, for example, recently convened a special committee to advise the governor on

D&A funding needs, and the data collection and reporting role of agencies such as the Bureau

of Drug and Alcohol Programs obviously suggest that they should also be part of the picture.

Jail Construction and Physical Plant Improvement

Construction projections for purposes of dealing with overcrowding problems cannot

be made with confidence until counties have engaged in the kinds of population control

analysis and exploration of alternatives described in the current report. However, one of the

findings of the project -- on the basis of on-site tours of the jails in every county visited and

on the basis of the statewide survey – is that some county jails are so antiquated that they need

to be replaced or significantly remodeled regardless of the size of the population. When

compounded by crowding pressures that make even the most basic classification, segregation,

and programming activities impossible, conditions in such facilities elevate concerns about

security, safety, and potential liability risks.

An important CCAP agenda item should be to work with counties in which at least the

most egregious case for construction/renovation can be made, and to develop a lobbying

strategy to take to the legislature for the necessary funding.

Support for Case Processing "Best Practices"

Two separate possibilities for CCAP activity exist in this category. First, to encourage

development and documentation of population control innovations, CCAP should consider

creating its own awards program for Pennsylvania counties along the lines of the national

level "best practices" component of the current project initiated with NACo. Collaborative

partnerships that might be explored here include NACo, PCCD, and, perhaps most

importantly, corporate and foundation funding sources to support the administration of the

program and to provide meaningful financial awards as incentives to participate.

At a much more critical level, counties can obviously use all the assistance they can

get to defray the expense of providing resources needed to allow them to pursue the kinds of

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alternative sanctioning "best practices" recommended in this report. A very important theme

of the current report is that much can and should be done by reallocation and realignment of

resources within existing budgets. However, a critical need in this category is once again to

promote and coordinate dialogue between county officials and relevant external funding

sources such as PCCD and state and federal legislators to identify and lobby for funding

priorities and options for some of the "bigger ticket" items such as pretrial service programs,

population control specialists, and PSI-based or defense-based sentencing planning services.

Other potential lobbying targets include funds for D&A and mental health treatment,

and rolling back recent cuts for probation/IP alternative sanctioning procedures and

technologies, and to support related system innovations such as centralized booking,

arraignment, and preliminary hearing. In each instance, the case for increased funding will

obviously be stronger if it can be tied to counties' ability to obtain the kinds of monitoring and

planning data discussed in this report, to make informed and credible projections of likely

impact, and to assess actual effects in terms of population control and important related

system goals. Examples include funding for videoconferencing technology to reduce

population-related processing delays and transportation problems, and to improve the

frequency and quality of contacts by public defender and probation staff that increase the

likelihood that alternative sanctioning options will be considered in a thorough and timely

fashion. A special context in which CCAP might represent the interests of counties is by

opening discussions with DOC about putting technologies and procedures in place to allow

counties to use videoconferencing for PCRA hearings to save transport and jail costs.7

One additional "best practice" that is universally advocated in criminal justice is the

use of sound prediction and classification tools at different decision stages of the criminal

justice process. Such tools should play an important role in targeting and placing defendants

as part of a system-wide alternative sanctions strategy. Consequently, a useful service to

counties would be to encourage them to seek the kind of technical assistance that is usually

necessary to help local officials to develop such techniques, and to lobby for funding to

agencies such as NIC and PCCD to meet the need.

7 Once again, the case for doing so would be strengthened immeasurably if counties kept good records of the number of PCRA cases, the costs of transportation, the jail-bed implications, and the outcomes of such appeals [to show many are successful and how many are a relatively fruitless drain on system resources].

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Miscellaneous Other Implications/Recommendations

• CCAP should offer/expand its criminal justice education programs for Commissioners and

key staff via CCAP conference workshops and/or special regional seminars.

The aim here is to empower commissioners, especially those who are newly elected, to be

more informed participants in the criminal justice SMP process by giving them a better

understanding of the system and of jail population dynamics in particular. A modified version

of the current project report could serve as a central curriculum resource. Input from agencies

such as the Sentencing Commission would be an invaluable component of the educational

process, to clarify in particular the range of possibilities for IP programs in lieu of jail

sentences and to clear up widespread confusion about the extent to which "mandatory"

sentences for DUI and other offenses may have exceptions that actually allow alternative

sentencing options to be considered.

• To provide a consistent structure and guidance to future technical assistance services, NIC

should encourage its consultants to adapt and apply the "population control self

assessment inventory" methodology in the current report for identifying and organizing

problems and prospects in the sites to be visited and as a pre-post measure of gauging the

impact of technical assistance services. CCAP could also apply a similar approach to a

broader follow up assessment of the impact of the current project.

CONCLUSION

The discussion of findings and recommendations in this report reveals a wide range of

concrete steps that can be explored to advance the population control cause at both SMP and

case processing levels. They range from very narrow actions with obvious direct links to

population control, such as adopting good time policies at the jail or a graduated sanctions

approach for probation and parole violations, to broader and more indirect strategies such as

improving information systems and other SMP capacity enhancements, implementing or

expanding supervised pretrial release, expedited case processing, and other far-reaching

procedural changes such as switching to a system of central or regionalized booking,

arraignments, and/or preliminary hearings.

As a general matter, expanding and improving the arsenal of substantive alternative

sanctions such as electronic home monitoring, other forms of intensive supervision, drug and

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alcohol treatment, and so on, is obviously an important part of solving the population control

puzzle. However, an important conclusion of the current project is that impediments to

population control and corresponding prospects for improvement may be more a function of

the policies and processes that direct and structure the ways in which decisions about jail or

alternative sanctions are made. The most extensive array of "alternative" sanctions and the

staffing resources to enforce them will do little to advance population control aims without

polices and procedures to assure that they are not squandered predominantly in a "net-

widening" fashion on populations at low risk of being incarcerated to begin with, rather than

being prioritized and clearly targeted towards offenders who would otherwise be in or on their

way to jail.

A starting point in every case is to elevate the standing and recognize the importance

of population control as a central goal of the system. As noted in the full project report:

Like other central system goals, such as reducing crime and recidivism and preserving the integrity of the criminal justice process, population control is an important and enduring concern that does not stop on the day a bigger facility is opened. Unfortunately, it is easy to lose sight of the importance of jail population control as a critical system goal unless attention is drawn to it because overcrowding has reached crisis proportions and the prospect of constructing new or expanded facilities raises awareness of the tremendous costs involved. However, jail population control does not derive its standing as an important system value only from the obligation of all government and criminal justice system leaders – especially those in elected positions -- to prevent crises and manage the expenditure of taxpayer funds in an accountable and prudent manner. Even in the absence of overcrowding, every avoidable jail admission and every unnecessary day spent in jail represents not only a failure to exercise responsible stewardship over county resources but also a breach of the system’s duty to do justice for the individuals involved.

Of course goals are not self-fulfilling and while subscribing to population control aims

is a necessary step in achieving them, it will not be sufficient grounds for success without a

corresponding commitment by county leadership to make sure that other policies, practices,

and resources across the system are explicitly and closely [re]aligned to match. At a policy

level, this begins with a shift in thinking to make alternative sanctions the presumptive norm

against which the generally more expensive, intrusive, and less constructive option of jail

must be justified. At a practice level, it suggests the need to make such a policy possible by

replacing or at least supplementing agency-specific or stage-specific thinking with a more

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system-wide perspective in which sanctioning resources and decision-making policies and

processes at every point are designed around the unifying population control goal.

The idea that population control goals will be more likely to be achieved if system

policies, procedures, and sanctioning resources are designed and allocated to match may on

the surface seem obvious. However, it is worth emphasizing repeatedly because even in

counties experiencing chronic overcrowding, it is not unusual to find that expressions of

concern are frequently poorly matched by actions to indicate that population control is really

being taken seriously and pursued aggressively and systematically enough. Even the most

cursory assessment of this type vividly highlights the tremendous gulf between ideal and

actual conditions on many dimensions of concern, and the critical need for changes in system

culture and professional attitudes as well as practice reforms.

For example, the themes of performance-based management, accountability, and

evidence-based practice are among the most widely advocated and accepted tenets of much

recent criminal justice reform literature. Contrast this with the failure of virtually every

county to collect and routinely report performance measures on even the most basic system

activities and outcomes – no annual reports, unknown rates of bail, sentencing, VOP and other

jail commitments, recidivism and system violations, etc.; the failure of available information

systems to serve the monitoring and planning needs of SMP/CJAB participants and other

system leaders; and, perhaps most troubling of all, the apparent comfort level of many key

decision working in such an environment, and their remarkable tolerance for the information-

deficient decision making ethos it promotes.

Similar gaps between "what we should be doing vs. what we actually do" take a wide

variety of other forms. If counties compare their CJAB operations with the list of

recommended attributes discussed in the final report, or their information systems against the

criteria of content, reliability, access, and integration, most are likely to see obvious

discrepancies and areas for improvement. The actual vs. recommended fit exercise is also

useful for spotting similar problems and change targets at the case processing level. National

standards recommending that all counties have a pretrial services capacity and use non-

financial conditions of pretrial supervised release in lieu of money bail obviously are far from

the norm in many jurisdictions. Strong conventional wisdom among experts in the drug and

alcohol field is that successful intervention is more likely the quicker offenders are entered

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into treatment. Yet criminal justice officials routinely hold defendants in jail for months prior

to disposition and sentencing at which time treatment needs may be addressed for the first

time. D& A professionals also expect relapse to be a fairly predictable part of the treatment

cycle, which obviously conflicts dramatically with the zero-tolerance mentality and policies

of some judges and many prosecutors and probation officials.

Some of the options discussed are in this report are deliberately ambitious and

thought-provoking. They are intended to stimulate non-traditional thinking about ways to

control jail populations and to prompt discussion of as full a range of options as possible by

government and justice system leaders. Choices about whether and how to make use of the

results are entirely a matter for local determination on a county-by-county basis. To the extent

that recommendations involve additional or restructured staffing and resources, they are

obviously not cost-free options. They should always be considered, however, in relation to the

expense of building and operating jail facilities, and the frequent ancillary benefits of many of

the proposed changes in terms of other efficiency and effectiveness gains for the system.