PREPPING FOR FREED PRISONERS

Federal and State Lockups Will Release Perhaps Thousands of Inmates
Next Year. L.A. County Should Prepare.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission corrected a subtle injustice last week
when it decided to retroactively reduce the sentences of inmates
imprisoned for using or selling crack cocaine, making those terms
correspond more closely with powder cocaine sentences. When justice
is vindicated, even late in the process, it's a victory for everyone.
But the victory isn't free.

Several thousand federal inmates currently behind bars on crack
convictions will be eligible for release beginning in March -- and
some of them could be coming to a street near you. It is pleasant to
imagine those people arriving home free of their addictions, fully
trained for readily available jobs, rehabilitated by prison and ready
to contribute to their communities. It is pleasant -- but a fantasy.

Many will come home with addictions intact, unprepared to take their
place in society and further damaged, rather than reformed, by their
stay in prison. States, counties and cities must choose now between
ramping up programs for drug treatment and job training or paying a
steeper price later as they deal with untreated addicts replenishing
the population of skid rows or jails. Police, at least, must prepare
for the influx of released addicts -- but what a foolish waste of
resources and lives it would be if cops were the only ones ready to
greet the inmates on their return to the streets.

In a stroke of good fortune, California has only 307 inmates in line
for release next year under the commission's decision. Los Angeles
and adjacent counties have 124. The numbers are significant but
manageable -- a minor seismic jolt in the scheme of things. But the
inmate-release Big One is on its way.

Later next year, federal judges overseeing California's crowded
prisons may free thousands of inmates before their terms are up, and
about a third of them will be coming to Los Angeles County. That's in
addition to prisoners who already ought to be out. The state's
correctional system is so overburdened with drug convicts and violent
criminals that it is incapable of even releasing prisoners on time,
because officials don't have the staff or technology to properly
calculate good-behavior credits.

Meanwhile, inmates aren't getting sufficient mental health or other
support, meaning that when they do come out, they are all too likely
to take their places on the costly and crazy county merry-go-round:
hospital, skid row, handcuffs, court and back to jail.

Los Angeles County may be hit hard by the housing slump and will have
little "extra" tax money to spend on the returning addicts and
ex-cons. But if supervisors fail to cobble together money now to
provide needed care for those soon-to-be discharged prisoners,
taxpayers most certainly will be paying a much higher bill later.