Former acting sheriff recommends jail overhaul

[Gladiator]

Former acting sheriff recommends jail overhaul - Total Buzz - OCRegister.com



Former acting sheriff recommends jail overhaul
October 27th, 2009, 6:03 pm · posted by Jennifer Muir

Former Assistant Orange County Sheriff Jack Anderson made a surprise appearance this afternoon at the board of supervisors meeting, promoting an idea to remove county jails from the sheriff’s department’s control and establish a new correctional agency to run them instead.

Anderson was speaking during public comments at the end of today’s meeting, and his three-minute time limit ran out before he could finish describing his proposal: Remove 95 percent of jail guards and replace them with non-sworn officers.

You might remember that supervisors appointed Anderson as acting sheriff in 2008 after Mike Carona resigned. Sheriff Sandra Hutchens, who incidentally is up for reelection next year, laid off Anderson and six other top ranking officers in August so she wouldn’t have to give pink slips to investigators, she said at the time.

Anderson said today that he’s considering whether to run against Hutchens for sheriff and has met with political consultants (he wouldn’t say who) and has been volunteering with the Republican party.

“I told them I’m very interested in running, but I want to feel comfortable I’d win the race,” he said. “I’m looking at it.”

Anderson was quick to add that his appearance before the board has nothing to do with that possibility. Instead, he says he came because the practice of using deputies in the jails is “a ludicrious, poor practice that taxpayers are having to shoulder the burden of.”

“It’s just one of those blatantly wrong things that needs to be fixed,” said Anderson, who noted he’ll be collecting severance checks from the county until early January. “I’m getting a check every pay period. I might as well do something to earn it.”

Here’s his argument: Taxpayers pay to train deputies for patrol, but they end up spending eight years in the jails before they’re eligible to leave. And most choose not to transfer to a patrol job when they become eligible because they can make more money (night pay boosts) and have a more consistent schedule if they stay in the jails. So taxpayers foot the bill for highly trained, highly expensive deputies to guard inmates when less expensive staffers could do the job. He estimates his plan could save the county tens of millions of dollars and divert resources to beef up patrol and investigations staff.

Anderson said he proposed the idea when he was still on staff at the department, but Hutchens decided against it. Instead, she opted to allow up to 35 percent nonsworn guards and keep the jails under her department’s control, he says.

Anderson said that he couldn’t come to last week’s meeting, when Hutchens gave a report about the state of the jails and an update about the correctional workers, because he was at the trial of ex-Lt. Bill Hunt. Hunt sued the county for being demoted after he ran against Carona for sheriff and lost. (Hunt also lost his case.)

“One thing we learned from the Hunt trial is you don’t criticize your boss,” Anderson said this afternoon. “I’m not being critical of Hutchens now, but I am being critical of the design of the organization and how it’s not effective. “

[Gladiator]

His speech:

Presentation to the Orange County Board of Supervisors
Jack Anderson
October 27, 2009

In these current economic hard times in our nation, state and local communities an opportunity exists to reexamine how our governments conduct business. There exist many opportunities to rid ourselves of poor government practices which are rooted in tradition, and to implement new innovative ways of delivering public services or at a minimum to implement proven best business practices that are successful elsewhere. The Orange County Board of Supervisors are uniquely poised to take advantage of an enormous opportunity with our county jail system and I am confident they are willing to exercise the political will and fiscal acumen to do what is right on behalf of the taxpayers today and for our future.

I strongly recommend that the Board approve the initiation of a comprehensive study to have our county jail operations transferred from the Sheriff’s jurisdiction to a new separate county agency, with a working title of the “Orange County Department of Custody” (OCDOC), an agency with its own department head appointed by the Board of Supervisors. The concept of operating a jail independent of the county sheriff’s department is not a new one in other jurisdictions in our nation or elsewhere in the state of California. For example, accomplished through an amendment to the county charter which was ratified by the county voters, since 1988 in the County of Santa Clara the county jails have been operated autonomously from the Sheriff’s Office. In 2004, the Santa Clara jails began housing federal and state prisoners to generate revenue to offset budget reductions. For the County of Orange there are many operational advantages to such an arrangement with the largest benefit being economics, where the cost of necessary jail operations can be reduced to create a potential annual savings of tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of millions every preceding decade. These savings can be returned to the taxpayers, used to enhance public safety or to fund the cost of other public services in our community.

The largest sustainable savings can be realized by the removal of up to 95 percent of the deputy sheriff series personnel from the jail. Replacing deputy sheriff jailers with a professional correctional officer series can include the correctional officers have their own career path into the ranks of supervision and management. The correctional officer positions will provide much needed consistency in the operations of our county jail, ensuring jail staff that are not transient in their assignment to the jail but truly dedicated to their chosen profession. Throughout California there has been a tradition, as with Orange County, of having deputy sheriff’s serving the role of jailer. This is a waning tradition that had run its course long ago and is not a fiscally responsible practice. When designed and executed properly the total compensation for a single professional correctional officer can save as much as $50,000 annually compared to a deputy sheriff jailer, which includes a more modest non-public safety retirement plan, and the cumulative savings would go a long way to toward reducing our county’s 3.1 billion dollar unfunded pension liability problem.

This proposal will also allow for the termination of other obsolete poor business practices related to maintaining deputy sheriff jailers. Traditionally in Orange County, newly hired deputy sheriffs begin their careers working less than a year in the county jail before moving on to patrolling the streets. Over the decades as our community has grown our county’s jails have expanded and the number of deputy sheriff jailers has correspondingly increased. During this same period sheriff’s patrol assignments opportunities have not grown proportionally to the jail, thus a bottleneck effect of deputy sheriffs waiting to transfer from the jail to a patrol assignment has worsened. Today the Orange County Sheriff’s Department continues to hire new deputy sheriffs, providing them with peace officer training in an academy for six-months to prepare them for patrol on the streets. The sheriff’s department then assigns newly trained deputy sheriffs to serve as jailers for up to eight-years before they can move on and do the job in which they were originally trained. I ask if any of the Board members would approve of such a poor practice?

A 2008 study of our county jail facilities concluded our jails are understaffed and recommended the addition of 455 more jail staff, if accurate the addition of more deputy sheriff jailers would serve to exacerbate the bottleneck effect. Looking even further ahead in time, if the County expands its jail facilities to the levels already approved in environmental impact reports in the coming decades then the addition of more deputy sheriff jailers will further worsen the bottleneck effect to where deputy sheriffs will be working 15 years as jailers before an assignment in patrol becomes available. It is interesting to observe that many deputies working in our jails earn more than those deputies working in patrol, and today there are over 200 deputies who after eight-years of working in the jail are eligible to transfer to a patrol assignment but choose not to transfer to a patrol many will remain in the jail by choice for their entire careers. It is important that I note that this problem is not the fault of the deputy sheriff jailers, they are honorable men and women who work hard doing a tough job.

No private company stock holder would approve the continuation of such a poor business practice, nor should the taxpayers of our county be expected to either. As a business model the current operation of our county jail system is broke, the taxpayers can ill afford to continue to pay the bill for such a mismanaged system steeped in tradition that defies modern good governance and business practices. The culpability for these problems lay in the past. Instead of criticism of the past I ask that as a community we work together to find solutions, with the Board of Supervisors’ support we have an opportunity to set the correct path for our future and I call upon them to act on the behalf of their constituents.

[THE Gimper]

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