AT JAIL, A 'SYSTEMS OVERLOAD'

Built for efficiency, Central Booking in Baltimore is overwhelmed,
keeping police waiting and people detained longer than allowed,
criminal justice officials say.

Built a decade ago, the state-run Central Booking and Intake Center in
downtown Baltimore was supposed to be the $56 million answer to
gridlock in the city's criminal justice system, designed to speed an
antiquated process of booking suspects.

Instead, law enforcement officials say, the facility has only made the
initial stages of arrest and detention more cumbersome, frustrating
police stuck for hours processing prisoners instead of patrolling, and
keeping people arrested on petty crimes jailed for hours or even days
longer than legally allowed.

Judges, prosecutors, police and defense lawyers say that Central
Booking is broken, overwhelmed with arrestees, crowded with suspects
awaiting trial and beset by inefficiencies that have complicated
efforts to confront the city's crime rate.

"It's not a new problem," District Court Judge Charlotte M. Cooksey
said in a recent interview. "Everybody is impacted by this in a very,
very negative way."

A Circuit Court judge will preside today over a hearing intended to
address some of the problems.

Evan Howard, an 18-year-old Polytechnic Institute graduate and Morgan
State freshman, knows the frustrations all too well. He was arrested
Friday after an officer accused him of refusing to obey orders to
leave a street corner in West Baltimore.

Howard spent the next 56 hours detained at Central Booking, crammed
with about 10 other people in a single-person cell, he said. He slept
on the floor, using his shirt as a pillow. He was released Monday
morning after prosecutors declined to charge him with a crime.

"They treat you like you're an animal in there," said Howard, who
doesn't have a criminal record. "I wasn't even charged."

His is not an isolated case. The law requires that a suspect be
released or see a court commissioner within 24 hours of arrest, but
the Public Defender's Office says it has identified, in a recent
four-day span, 122 people who were held longer than 24 hours - one for
89 hours.

Central Booking, opened in 1995, is a gray monolith that looms over
the Jones Falls Expressway. The $56 million building, which put
disparate law enforcement agencies under one roof, was constructed
around a new system for seamlessly processing suspects. Leonard A.
Sipes Jr., then the corrections spokesman, said at the time, "This
will revolutionize the way we conduct business."

It was to be the keystone of the city's criminal justice system -
where police turn over suspects to the state, prosecutors decide
whether to press charges, suspects get defense attorneys, and judges
and court commissioners decide whom to release.

Contention

Judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors and others meet regularly to
discuss fixes that could make Central Booking run the way it was
envisioned. However, contention festers because no one has found a
solution.

Cooksey wrote a memo Monday to city judges, prosecutors, public
defenders and police: "As usual, each agency is blaming another
agency, and the finger pointing is getting in the way of finding a
solution." She added that the problems "require immediate attention
and correction."

In her memo, Cooksey blamed the failures on a wide array of agencies
and said that police and booking officials sometimes duplicate work,
such as criminal record checks, causing delays that last up to eight
hours.

She said prosecutors do not decide quickly enough when to file charges
and that police do not promptly file their statements of probable
cause. Cooksey also criticized booking officials for not prioritizing
suspects to get minor offenders through the system quickly. Retrieving
property for released inmates takes three hours, she wrote.

Mayor Martin O'Malley and state corrections system Secretary Mary Ann
Saar recently exchanged heated letters about Central Booking.

O'Malley wrote that police are "very discouraged by the lack of
urgency and commitment that they see at [Central Booking] everyday."
Saar wrote back, "The simple fact is that more arrestees are coming in
than was ever planned."

Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for the city State's Attorney's
Office, said the mayor and police have failed to filter minor
offenders from the system.

Prosecutors decline to prosecute about 30 percent of people arrested,
not including those picked up on warrants, concluding that either
there is insufficient evidence to support an arrest or obtain a
conviction, or that the time the suspect has served in jail is sufficient.

"We can't just arrest, arrest, arrest to address violent crime," Burns
said. "Baltimore is in the midst of a public safety crisis."

Kristen Mahoney, chief of technical services for the city Police
Department, described the system as an assembly line with constant
undetected bottlenecks, such as one machine being used to take mug
shots. Such problems force police to wait outside the booking center
for as long as five hours until their arrestees taken in for processing.

"There are some tremendous systemic problems that need to be
addressed," she said.

Mahoney said the police ability to protect the city should not be
limited by the capacity of a state-run building. She said that police
are making quality arrests but that prosecutors are choosing not to
file charges.

Central Booking was designed to handle about 60,000 bookings a year;
it is now taking on more than 100,000. With a capacity of 895, it
regularly holds nearly 1,200. Commissioner William J. Smith of the
Division of Pretrial Detention and Services calls it a "systems overload."

Howard, the Morgan student majoring in civil engineering, was arrested
near his home shortly before 9 p.m. Friday in the 2800 block of
Winchester St. The arresting officer wrote that he had refused
previous orders to leave a corner where he was talking to a friend.
Howard said he had just arrived home from work at a nursing home, so
he couldn't have refused any prior orders.

The officer took him to Central Booking. He "told me I would be out in
the morning," Howard said.

Instead, Howard said, his confinement caused him to miss work
Saturday. He spent Saturday night with his nose crammed under the door
of his holding cell so he could avoid the smoke from cellmates.

"I felt as though I was at the Baltimore Zoo," he said.

Each time he asked when he would get out, a detention officer
disappeared but never returned with an answer. Despite the 24-hour
law, he says the detention officers told him, "You can be held for two
to three days, and after that it would be against your human rights."

The new center was intended to provide a central, high-tech
clearinghouse, replacing a system in which arrestees were processed at
the city's nine district police stations.

With Central Booking, officers arrest suspects and a police wagon pick
up the suspects at the scene. It was designed to enable officers to
immediately return to work; they could write and file their statements
of charges from remote stations in the districts.

The new system allows for additional filters intended to clear minor
offenders out of the system before they spend excessive time behind
bars. A judge is stationed at Central Booking to weed out minor cases,
and prosecutors are there to determine cases not worth pursuing.

"The only thing it's done is slow things down," said Lt. Frederick V.
Roussey, the president of the city's police union.

Lines and glitches

The remote computers run outdated operating systems and are regularly
broken, police said. That forces the officers to drive to Central
Booking to fill out forms, pulling them from the streets. In February,
a printer ran out of ink, rendering the remote stations useless.
Corrections workers told police it would take four days to replace the
ink cartridge.

Then there are the lines of handcuffed suspects waiting in a courtyard
outside the facility.

Smith said they are caused by police dumping large groups of arrestees
at Central Booking without warning. But police say that doesn't
explain the length of lines they often face. Police felt the problem
was so bad that they started documenting their encounters. The Sun
obtained some of the memos.

On March 11, 406 arrestees being detained in a temporary holding area
in Central Booking had not been processed. One night in July, an
officer with seven arrestees reported waiting 7 1/2 hours outside
Central Booking - and still having 37 arrestees in front of him in
line.

"Once they back up 40 people outside, then you're going to be there
five hours," said Matt Jablow, a police spokesman.

About 15 officers patrol a district at a time, so losing a couple to
Central Booking can have a large impact on the police ability to
respond to emergency calls, Roussey said. Each district typically has
two transport wagons working at a time, but if both get stuck at
Central Booking, the officers must drive each arrestee downtown - and
some officers can't do that because their cars don't have protective
cages.

"You've got cops sitting on the streets, waiting for wagons," Jablow
said.

When Central Booking backs up, it's announced over the police radio
system - sending a message many police interpret as code for stop
making arrests.

Smith said his employees at Central Booking work as quickly as
possibly, while searching all arrestees for weapons and taking steps
to maintain a safe facility. He noted that he can't control the
suspect inflow.

"I don't have an option of turning them away," he said.

Some have blamed the overflow on O'Malley's strict policing strategy,
begun four years after Central Booking opened. It called for stricter
police enforcement of nearly all laws. Arrests by city police surged
past 100,000 per year.

New strategies call for fewer, but smarter, arrests. The number of
people put into handcuffs has dropped 30 percent this year compared
with last, but booking is still overwhelmed. "We thought," Jablow
said, "that would help solve [the problem] much more than it has."

Howard, the student who recently saw the troubles firsthand, said he
can't imagine a worse system. He left Central Booking on Monday about
4 a.m. with a new impression of Baltimore.

"It just made me not want to live in this community anymore," he said.
"It made me not want to come outside."

Sun staff writer Julie Bykowicz contributed to this article.