The Daily News of Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — The first wave of felons sent to county jails instead of state prisons under Gov. Jerry Brown's public safety realignment plan are back on the streets after serving their sentences, and local law enforcement officials are worried they will trigger a spike in crime.

Almost all of the felons are under no obligation to report to a parole agent or probation officer, and many did not get job training and other rehabilitation services while behind bars.

"Of those 9,000 who have been sentenced to jail in lieu of prison, about 90 percent of them are going to come out without supervision by a probation officer or a parole agent," county Chief Probation Officer Jerry Powers said during a recent meeting of the Southern California Association of Governments.

"They're simply going to walk out of jail a free person, and we will have no ability to compel them to engage in drug treatment, mental health treatment or anything of that sort," he added. "As soon as they hit that public sidewalk, they are truly free."

Realignment, also known as AB 109, is the governor's way of complying with a Supreme Court mandate to reduce overcrowding in state prisons.

Among the strategies for lowering the inmate population is to send most felons sentenced with non-serious, non-violent and non-sex crimes to county jails instead.

If the felons had stayed in state prisons, they would have been required by state law to report to parole agents for one or more years after their release.

They would also have been ordered to stay away from their victims, and been subject to warrantless searches. Some might also have been compelled to undergo services to ease their re-entry into society.

Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Michel Moore said realignment provided no such "safety net" for felons diverted to county jails.

"It's a pretty big omission in the statute," added Deputy District Attorney Kraig St. Pierre, in charge of the county DA's Parole Revocation Section.

But Luis Patino, a spokesman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, noted realignment does not prevent felons from being supervised after their release from county jail, but leaves it to the decision of a judge.

"AB 109 does not inhibit judges from placing an offender on probation supervision once they leave jail," he said. "Superior Court judges are given that discretion through split sentencing."

Under split sentencing, a four-year jail term, for example, can be converted to two years behind bars and two years under probation.

According to a recent study by the Chief Probation Officers of California or CPOC, however, it is used very rarely in Los Angeles County.

Since realignment took effect in October 2011 through June 2012, only 370 out of 6,800 AB 109 felons were given split sentences.

That's only 5 percent, when most other counties in the state use split sentences at least 40 percent of the time. A few apply it to 100 percent their cases.

Moore said jail terms should automatically come with a so-called "supervision tail," which allows local law enforcement officers to keep tabs on felons who are back in the community.

"With realignment, it appears there's some kind of bargaining that has to go on, where if we want community supervision, felons have to get less time in custody," he said.

Moore, Powers, St. Pierre and Assistant Sheriff Cecil Rhambo argue there is a need for legislative fixes to AB 109 so that - at a minimum - felons released from county jail can be subjected to warrantless searches for a certain period of time.

But some key lawmakers, including state Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, oppose that idea.

"If we were to mandate a tail on jail felons, then no one would use the alternative sanctions like split sentencing that were part of the public safety realignment," said Mark Hedlund, a spokesman for Steinberg, D-Sacramento.

"The goal of realignment was to improve the system - not just to push down the same problems with overcrowding to the local level," he added. "This proposal is premature and in conflict with the overall goal of realignment."

Felons violating probation would have to be thrown back into county jail, which is already almost at full capacity because of realignment - so much so that the Sheriff's Department is thinking of outsourcing jail beds.

The overcrowding in state prisons was partly due to felons being recommitted after violating parole.

Also, though the recent approval of Proposition 30 guaranteed funding for realignment, it would not cover the additional cost of jailing AB 109 felons who violate probation.

CPOC advocated an increase in the use of split sentencing.

"When local prison offenders do not receive a split sentence they are released to the community at the end of their sentence and opportunities to change criminal behavior for this population are usually lost," it said in a brief. "Split sentencing would diminish this risk to success by incorporating supervision by the probation officer into supervision and treatment plans."

To provide felons with some re-entry programs while they are behind bars - a captive audience, so to speak - the Sheriff's Department is ramping up its Education-Based Incarceration Program, which provides vocational courses and life-skills classes.

So far, realignment has put about 9,000 felons in county jails instead of state prisons over the last 14 months. Of those, about 4,000 have been released.

Since nobody keeps track of them, it is unclear how many have committed new crimes.

St. Pierre said the governor has called these felons "lower-level offenders," but that may be a misnomer.

"Before AB 109, these people would have gone to state prison," St. Pierre said. "In L.A. County, unless you commit a big-deal crime, you generally do not get a state prison commitment on your first conviction."

He explained many of them likely amassed a significant misdemeanor record and/or juvenile record. Some may even have prior felony convictions.

Aside from the 4,000 released from county jail, there are another 12,000 AB 109 felons in Los Angeles County who finished serving their sentences in state prison but came under the less-stringent supervision of probation agents instead of parole agents.

About 3,600 of that population went to LAPD territory, where 2,800 were rearrested for various offenses and 500 absconded. At least seven were accused of murder, including Ka Pasasouk, who has been arrested on suspicion of killing of four people in Northridge.

Preliminary data on the crime rate in areas patrolled by the LAPD showed that, overall, violent crimes and property crimes still dropped between 2011 and 2012, though by only 1.2 percent.

In the previous year, the decline was 6 percent.

Property crimes, in particular, rose by 0.4 percent. That's in contrast to the previous year, before realignment, when property crime decreased almost 4 percent.

In areas patrolled by the Sheriff's Department, violent crimes increased by almost 3 percent, and property crimes by more than 4 percent, between 2011 and 2012.

The largest spike was in theft, 6.15 percent; and burglary, 3.92 percent.

Rhambo attributed those to both the struggling economy and realignment, noting "we have had thousands of people released who are pretty much drug addicts or property crime violators."

Moore said unless the AB 109 population had post-release supervision and reentry programs - whether through a supervision tail or split sentencing - the progress made over several years to reduce the crime rate could be jeopardized.

"Make no mistake about it," he said, "when 85 percent of our crime in the city of Los Angeles is property-related, offenders who are not properly reintegrated into society pose a substantial risk to us losing our decade-long decrease in crime."

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