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| Officials plan for inmate shift |
| By hanfordsentinel.com |
| Published: 08/04/2011 |
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Local law enforcement officials met Wednesday to outline plans for how they’ll meet the requirements of the state law aimed at keeping lesser criminals in area jails and out of the state’s 33 prisons. The officials, along with the Kings County Community Corrections Partnership Committee, discussed the upcoming realignment shift. “We have a lot of hurdles to cross here in Kings County, but I’m very pleased with the input everyone provided at the meeting,” Sheriff Dave Robinson said. The plans approved Wednesday still must be OK’d by the county Board of Supervisors. Meanwhile, the Community Corrections Partnership plans to meet quarterly to discuss any adjustments needed to make the realignment shift go smoothly. “This is all brand new to us,” Hanford Police Chief Carlos Mestas said. “We are reinventing the wheel here. Hopefully, if things change, we will be able to tweak it and make it work for us.” As responsibility for housing parole violators and newly sentenced inmates shifts to California’s 58 counties, area officials have grown concerned. The Public Safety Realignment bill passed earlier this year by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown has local jails housing nonserious, nonviolent and nonsexually-charged inmates — called “non-non-nons” by law enforcement. But with the Kings County Jail already operating near capacity and additional funding for the bill in legislative limbo, the future is anything but certain. “It’s critically important that the governor follow through with his promise to put funding in place on a long-term basis,” Robinson said. “Unfortunately, the state budget was only signed on June 30 and that’s thrown things into uncertainty.” Currently, AB 109 is only funded for the first nine months. That adds up to about $3.2 million for Kings County — a drop in the bucket for a county that spends more than $10 million a year just maintaining the jail. Chief Probation Officer Steve Brum said the county will expand its electronic-monitoring program to allow 100 pre- and post-sentence offenders to be released with GPS monitoring bracelets. Among other things, the county also wants to use state funding to bring on new probation officers and have at least one on-call officer 24 hours a day to assist other law enforcement agencies. Contrary to popular opinion, the realignment bill will not result in inmates being released early or transferred from state to local facilities. Instead, inmates will now be sentenced to serve time in the counties where they are convicted. To cope, sheriff’s officials plans to add 80 bunk beds to the jail to increase inmate capacity from 361 to 441. They also propose dividing two inmate yards with chain-link fences to give them four areas to work with. Robinson said they will also need to increase staffing at the jail to monitor the increased numbers. To help with this, he also wants to change shifts at the jail to 12-hour schedules to help eliminate overtime. “I don’t want to release any inmates early due to a population cap on the jail,” Robinson said. “I’d prefer, if someone is let out, it’s because they have served their sentence and moved on to probation or into a rehabilitation or monitoring program they qualify for.” Early projections show the Kings County Jail housing an average 24 more prisoners every month after the law goes into effect on Oct. 1, according to statistics by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Read More. |
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