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| 7/21/2010 6:09:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article |
Analysis of jail population first step in creating 'pretrial services,' Milwaukee County official says
Programs allow low-risk offenders to be sent home instead of being jailed
VICKY WEDIG FARENCE
Delavan Enterprise Editor
Walworth County's first step in creating programs to allow defendants to be released to the community rather than sitting in jail is determining who is in its jail, a Milwaukee County official told a Walworth County committee last week Friday.
"You gotta figure out who's in your jail," Holly Szablewski, who oversees Milwaukee County's pretrial services, told the Walworth County Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee.
Szablewski gave the committee a presentation about Milwaukee County's pretrial services, which cost $2 million per year and free up costly jail space for the most serious offenders.
Pretrial services are things like drug court, global positioning system monitoring, intensive alcohol and drug and mental health treatment and monitoring and a forensic tracking program that allow Milwaukee County to send low-risk defendants home and monitor them rather than keeping them in jail. The programs use evidence-based information to predict a defendant's likelihood of "pretrial misconduct" like failing to appear in court or getting arrested again and monitor them to make sure they show up for court appearances and don't get arrested again. Szablewski said Walworth County's first step in creating such programs of its own is a jail population analysis.
Walworth County Jail Administrator Mike Schmitz said he already has put in a request for technology assistance with the Pretrial Justice Institute for an analysis of the jail population.
From that analysis, Szablewski said, Walworth County should be able to get an idea of how much of its jail population might qualify for pretrial services. Szablewski said Milwaukee County's analysis showed its average length of stay continued to increase despite decreases in crime, arrests and bookings. She said analysts were able to identify how much money the county could save if it reduced its lengths of stays.
Szablewski said the next step for Walworth County would be to implement a screening tool to administer to each defendant who is booked into the jail. That tool would identify specific low-risk offenders who would be suitable for pretrial programs.
Milwaukee County's screening tool was a six-page electronic form that scored the individual based on things like the type of charge, prior convictions, employment, whether the person is a primary caregiver and how long the individual has lived at the same address. She said Walworth County would have to hire three people - one per shift - to screen defendants at a cost of about $140,000, which would be offset by reducing the cost of housing those inmates in the jail.
Szablewski said the county could borrow a screening tool from a neighboring county, use it for a while to see whether it works for Walworth County and later validate the tool for its jurisdiction.
Elkhorn resident Paula McGowan, the mother of a recovering heroin addict, urged the committee to move forward with a drug court, which gives drug- and alcohol-related offenders alternatives to jail.
Family court commissioner David Reddy, who will be sworn in this month as a Circuit Court judge, has said drug court allows a defendant to enter a plea, but a finding of guilty is withheld. A program is set up for the defendant that might include drug and alcohol dependency education, group treatment sessions and random drug tests. If the defendant fails to complete the program, he or she is found guilty, and the matter proceeds to sentencing, he said.
McGowan said her son "had an excellent drug court judge in Cook County (Illinois) that did not give up on any clients she had."
She said the seating of Reddy, who has said a drug court is a practical way to reduce the jail population while staying tough on crime, is an opportunity to implement a drug court, which she said is badly needed in Walworth County.
Reddy will replace Judge Michael S. Gibbs as the Branch 4 judge in Walworth County Circuit Court on Aug. 1.
McGowan said building a $10 million jail to incarcerate more people is a move in the wrong direction.
"I think that's the absolute wrong way to go," she said. "I think we need an alternative program."
Walworth County is studying the possibility of expanding its jail but has not generated a dollar figure related to potential construction.
McGowan likened drug addiction and its treatment to cancer.
"Not everybody can be saved," she said. "But we can save a lot of them."
With incarceration, McGowan said, the first thing addicts do when they're released "is hit the drugs and alcohol" and end up back in jail.
"It's a revolving door," she said.
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