DOES BENTON COUNTY, OREGON, NEED A NEW JAIL? Version Three 1 By John H. Detweiler

Transcription

1 September 25, 2015 DOES BENTON COUNTY, OREGON, NEED A NEW JAIL? Version Three 1 By John H. Detweiler detweij@peak.org For the last fifteen years, the powers-that-be in Benton County have tried to convince the voter-taxpayers that the County needs a new jail. The County tells the voter-taxpayer how inadequate the old jail is and asks the voter-taxpayer to fund a new jail. Moreover, the County hires public relations firms to educate the voter-taxpayer. What the County does not do is hire analytical firms to support these requests with appropriate studies. The Benton County voter-taxpayers are about to go through this exercise again. The Benton County Board of Commissioners will ask the voter-taxpayers in November for up to $25 million to build a new jail. The plans call for a 110-bed (I assume cells) facility with a twenty bed (I assume these are not cells) work-release center, space for training and rehabilitation programs, and space for medical and mental health treatment. Again, the Commissioners hired a Eugene public relations firm, to educate the public on the need for a new facility. The Commissioners did not hire an analytical firm to support the request with appropriate study. The first section of this paper is the summary and conclusions. In the second section, I define the problem that Benton County should be solving. In the third section, I estimate the number of beds (cells) that are required. In the fourth section, I discuss the increasing numbers of people being booked and the increasing length of stay in jail. Summary and Conclusions Benton County has not done sufficient homework to justify building a new jail. The County needs to optimize the criminal justice system which includes alternative programs to jail, determine the number of beds and other facilities each program in the system needs to be effective, and determine if it is cheaper to build or rent facilities. The County is asking the voter-taxpayer to build a 110-bed jail without optimizing the criminal justice system. Moreover, we do not know the effects of alternative programs to jail on the number of needed jail beds. Proceeding as if we know these effects and using the jail statistics on the Sheriff s web site, I estimate that 100 jail beds would be enough until 2030 when four more beds should be acquired. From the available statistics, it is apparent that Benton County has been locking up more people for longer periods which tells me that the County needs to do its homework in the near future. The voter-taxpayer should keep voting NO on a new jail until the County does its homework so we end up with an effective and least cost criminal justice system. If the voter-taxpayer does not vote NO, we will throw more money down a rat-hole as was done when buying the right-of-way for a defunct railroad. 1 This is the third, and probably last, version of this paper. The Sheriff added more months of data to the virtual jail statistics since the last version. Page 1 of 8

2 Problem Definition As I have said at various times over the past fifteen years, the criminal justice system is a complex system of queues that can be modeled and optimized minimize the cost subject to having enough capacity for the system to be effective. By cost, I mean the net present value of the system using Benton County s cost of capital as the discount rate over an appropriate period probably the expected life of the jail. And, by effective, I mean being able to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The scopes of the alternative system configurations need to be the same for all alternatives considered; if this is not the case, the comparisons will not be valid. There are alternatives to putting people in jail. To quote a relatively recent study by CRS Inc. on alternatives to jail in Benton County 2, There are two primary ways to reduce the demand for jail beds: 1. Divert persons from entering the jail in the first place. 2. Shorten the length of time inmates spend in jail. Benton County is lagging behind many other counties with regard to the availability of residential settings for defendants and offenders. Work release and other residentially based programs are simply missing in Benton County, creating a major gap in the range of options that are needed. Filling the gaps by creating sufficient residential settings, and restoring many of the programs and services that have been lost in recent years, will make the criminal justice system more balanced and as a result, more effective. In the long run, taxpayers will find that investment in system improvements, not just in jail beds, will prove cost effective. Quoting the CRS study again, In spite of the hard work and good intentions of the community and its officials, the Benton County criminal justice system continues to deteriorate. The system is currently less efficient and less effective than it has been in the past, posing growing risks to the community and losing opportunities to improve public safety and the quality of life. As part of determining the optimum system configuration, work release and other residentially based programs need to be included and estimates need to be made of the people who would be in each of these programs as well as those who would be in jail. The Department of Corrections (DOC) identifies 3 seven key sanctions that are an integral part of its community corrections program: 1. Work Center, 2. Electronic Monitoring, 3. House Arrest, 4. Day Reporting, 5. Intensive Supervision Probation, 6. Community Service, and 7. Community Work Crew. Programs executing these sanctions and the flow of people into and out of these programs and jail need to be included in the criminal justice system configurations. Build versus rent analyses need to be made for each program facility including jail -- after determining the number of beds/slots we need in each program. Who actually owns the facilities is not important; what is important is that Benton County has the use of the facilities. Moreover, the rent versus build analysis needs to include the cost of transporting people to and from the rented facilities as well as the cost of upgrading the current jail, and if we build a new jail, the costs of removing the old jail. An Estimate the Beds Required The County is asking for 110 jail beds without providing sufficient support for that number. However, the Sheriff does have a virtual jail which can be found at the Benton County Jail Virtual Jail Statistics webpage on the Sheriff s website. Quoting the webpage, The Virtual Jail is a statistical system that we utilize to track the number of individuals who normally should be held in the Benton County Jail, but have been released due to the lack of bed space. The data show the virtual jail statistics since Keep in mind, that these numbers do not take into account how our jail population would be affected by other variables in the Justice System if a larger jail existed. For example, the Courts, Parole & Probation and Patrol divisions may alter their processes if adequate jail space 2 Benton County Jail Alternatives Study. CRS Inc. Gettysburg PA, November 27, P40. I obtained this study from the Benton County Sheriff. 3 The source is the CRS study mentioned in footnote two. Page 2 of 8

3 existed. The virtual jail is an attempt to give us an informed estimate of the number of beds that would be needed and what our numbers would look like if we had a larger jail. My comment is that the Courts and the Parole & Probation and Patrol divisions might have made different confinement decisions if the County had rented 20 more cells bringing the total number of cells/beds to 100. Moreover, the effects of the twenty work-release beds and other sanction programs on the number of jail beds are unknown because the County has not done the homework. Proceeding as if we know the effects of other sanction programs on the number of jail beds needed, a useful statistic that is presented on the virtual jail web page is the monthly maximum daily occupancy. A graph of the monthly maximum daily occupancy for the past five years is shown below. Notice that of the sixty-seven observations, only one is more than 100. Given this data, we need to find the probability of needing any number of beds. Then the number of beds purchased becomes a policy decision. Since the criminal justice system is a system of queues, the daily inmate count can be modeled with a Poisson distribution. The monthly maximum daily occupancy is an n th order statistics where n is /12 slightly more than thirty days. Using the density function for n th order statistic and the normal approximation for the Poisson distribution, I computed the maximum likelihood estimator for the Poisson parameter a constant and a linear increase with time 4. The computer run is in the Appendix I. As the reader can see from the computer run, the Poisson parameter 5 is a little less than sixty-six inmates in 2010 and increases at about 0.6 inmates per year. The increase rate is statistically significant at the 5% level. If one has been following the changes to the estimate of the Poisson parameter over the versions of this paper, one will notice that the linear increase is becoming steeper as the amount of data increases. Moreover, the standard errors of both the constant and increase are getting smaller. 4 Fifteen years ago, when the County started asking for a new jail, the number of requested beds was lower than it is now. Therefore, I assumed that the Poisson parameter must be increasing over time. 5 The Poisson parameter is the mean and variance of the distribution. Page 3 of 8

4 I then plotted the cumulative distribution function with small confidence intervals for the number of beds for the years 2020, 2030, and The reason I used such small confidence intervals was to keep the confidence interval lines from crossing each other making the graph hard to read. The reader should observe that the confidence intervals increase with time. That plot is shown below. As can be seen from the CDFs, the probability of needing the 110 beds that are in the current plan within the next twenty-five years is very small. I expect that the County could get by obtaining the use of 100 beds until 2030 and 104 beds until Bookings and Length of Stay The number of bookings and the average length of stay (ALOS) in the jail have been increasing. The DLR 6 study tells us that yearly bookings have increased from 3262 in 2006 to 3571 in The CRS study shows an increase in ALOS of from 6.8 days in 2005 to 10.2 days in And, the DLR study tells us that the ALOS in 2012 is 17 days and that 39.6% stay less than one day. The CRS study tells us that 72.3% of people were released within one day in 2005 while 50.2% were released within one day in These statistics tell us that we are locking up more people for longer periods. In an effort to determine if these statistics have changed since 2012, I looked at the data from the August 8 th-7 release and confinements report. The release report is a list of everyone that was released within the previous 30 days and their imprison and release dates the length of stay. The confinement report is a list of everyone that is in jail as of August 8 th -- the difference between August 8 th and imprison date is the censored length of stay. Statistics for the reports are contained in Appendix II. Assuming that the people on the confinement report with a zero length of stay will be released that day, 25% of the people in these two reports stay less than one day. The mean length of stay for those released is 9.3 days. The mean length of stay for those confined, as of August 8 th, is 51 days; when they are eventually released, the length of stay will be longer. 6 Benton County. Jail Needs Final Report. DLR Group. July 19, There is nothing significant about this date other than I thought to do it on that date. The date is a convenience sample; not a random sample of any kind. The data for longer periods is not readily available on the Sheriff s website. Page 4 of 8

5 Assuming that a Weibull distribution would represent the distribution of the length of stay, I estimated the parameters with a maximum likelihood procedure the likelihood function for uncensored and censored data. The results of the computer run are in Appendix III. A graph of the density function is shown below. The graph has a shape that is very similar to the bar chart of ALOS for the years 2008 to 2012 in the DLR study telling me a Weibull distribution is appropriate. The mean length of stay from this distribution is about 62 days. Given the length of stay in earlier years and its slow increase, 62 days seems high; however, there are several long time prisoners who tend to skew the distribution. The point of this discussion is to observe that as time goes by, we are locking up more people for longer periods; and as I read the CRS report, the crimes are getting more serious. Had we had the seven key sanctions identified by the Oregon DOC, we might not be locking up so many people for so long. Which brings me back to saying that we need an optimized criminal justice system in the near future. Page 5 of 8

6 APPENDIX I JAIL2015_05.OUT 9/23/15 13:08:38 Poisson parameter constant and slope. ====================================================================== MaxlikMT Version /23/2015 1:08 pm ====================================================================== return code = 0 normal convergence Log-likelihood Number of cases 67 Covariance of the parameters computed by the following method: ML covariance matrix Parameters Estimates Std. err. Est./s.e. Prob. Gradient Beta[1,1] Beta[2,1] Correlation matrix of the parameters Wald Confidence Limits 0.95 confidence limits Parameters Estimates Lower Limit Upper Limit Gradient Beta[1,1] Beta[2,1] Number of iterations 5 Minutes to convergence Page 6 of 8

7 APPENDIX II JAIL2015A-03.OUT 16:11:15 8/27/15 Statistics for people released past 30 days as of 8/25/15 mean = std dev = n = median = Days confined Number of People Statistics for people confined as of 8/25/15 mean = std dev = n = median = Days confined Number of People Page 7 of 8

8 APPENDIX III JAIL2015A-04.OUT 17:12:52 9/18/15 Weibull distribution scale and shape parameters. liklihood = (1-d)[ln(c)+(c-1)ln(x)-c*ln(1/b)] -(x/b)^c b=scale parameter c=shape parameter d=0 if not censored -- released d=1 if censored - confined x= days in jail as of 8/25/15 ==================================================================== MaxlikMT Version /18/2015 5:12 pm ==================================================================== return code = 0 normal convergence Log-likelihood Number of cases 260 Covariance of the parameters computed by the following method: ML covariance matrix Parameters Estimates Std. err. Est./s.e. Prob. Gradient b[1,1] c[1,1] Wald Confidence Limits 0.95 confidence limits Parameters Estimates Lower Limit Upper Limit Gradient b[1,1] c[1,1] Number of iterations 15 Minutes to convergence mean days of confinement = median days of confinement = variance of days of confinement = Page 8 of 8