JAIL BAN SPURRING AID EFFORTS

Officials Look to Get Prostitutes Off Streets, into Rehab

Concern about the Hamilton County jail's ban on holding female
suspects accused of nonviolent crimes prompted officials Thursday to
look for alternatives for those they say cause most of the crowding -
accused prostitutes.

Cincinnati police commanders, worried about the impact of making the
jail a revolving door for prostitutes, met Thursday with members of
the Local Corrections Planning Board. Chairman Mike Walton said the
group, made up of law enforcement officers, judges, court employees
and social service workers, agreed to:

Ask the county for money, probably less than $100,000, to hire two
"motivational interviewers" to talk to prostitutes in the jail and
find those who would benefit from treatment, either for substance
abuse, mental health issues or both, and get them into that treatment.

"It's kind of a new concept," Walton said. "And I think the best kind
of person for this ... might be somebody who's been through it,
somebody who's been addicted."

Ask Sheriff Simon Leis, who set the order against keeping women
overnight for anything but certain violent and serious felonies, to
relax that policy in cases of prostitutes with significant criminal
histories, such as robbing their clients. Walton and several others
plan to meet next week to start setting criteria.

To set up a task force of five or six officials who will focus only on
prostitution and look into using 36 beds available at the First Step
Home and Talbert House agencies as residential placement for
prostitutes.

Walton also said he hopes to soon get a grant of about $75,000 from
the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, which the board will use
to start planning a comprehensive county program for
prostitutes.

The group will look around, he said, at the best programs elsewhere
but might focus on The SAGE Project Inc. in San Francisco, a program
started by a former prostitute. SAGE stands for Standing Against
Global Exploitation. The group's first-time offender program provides
early intervention and peer support for women trying to get out of
prostitution and uses fees paid by arrested johns to fund the services.

The grant has not been approved, but Walton expects it to
be.

Cincinnati officers alone made more than 1,000 prostitution arrests
last year,said Capt. Vince Demasi, investigations commander. For
years, he has been saying prostitutes come with so many mental health
and drug abuse problems that they needed more help than incarceration.
Thursday, he said he was happy people listened.

"Substance abuse is 98 percent of the problem," he said. "They're
addicted to crack, and they're doing prostitution to get the money for
the drugs they want."

Those factors make the women a difficult population to deal with in
jail, Leis has said, because they often have to be housed separately
from other prisoners and need more services.

He, too, has been pleading for help for years. He said the current
main jail facility downtown was crowded the day it opened in 1985. And
that was before females became such a growing jail population - up 30
percent in Hamilton County over the past decade. Total inmates have
jumped about 5 percent in that same time period.

Leis sent a teletype to the county's police agencies April 15, telling
them the jail would no longer take females unless they're charged with
any of a list of 45 violent and serious felonies from aggravated
murder to kidnapping, aggravated assault and carrying concealed
weapons. Any other women arrested would be fingerprinted,
photographed, given a court date and released.

Leis, who is running unopposed for a fifth term, reiterated Thursday
through spokesman Steve Barnett that the answer is simple: He needs
more jail space. But Walton said the group did not discuss that.

In Madisonville, when Citizens on Patrol members see women they
suspect are prostitutes, they usually don't call the police anymore.
Even before the new policy, they knew the women wouldn't spend much
time behind bars.

Instead, said member Patricia Markley, they watch or follow her for a
little while. If the woman turns around to look at them, they ask her
if she's OK. They call for help if she doesn't appear to be.