LFP Court Saving Money By Putting Offenders To Work

Lake Forest Park has come up with a way to save money on jail costs by putting offenders to work.

And that’s important, officials say, because keeping someone in jail is one of the city’s biggest expenses.

The new approach, implemented early this year, gives Municipal Court Judge Linda Portnoy another tool in her bag of sentencing options.

 It allows her to sentence some people who’ve been convicted of crimes in Lake Forest Park to Seattle-based work crews overseen by the Washington Department of Corrections.

Lake Forest Park doesn’t have its own jail, so it pays Lynnwood, Yakima and King County for jail services.

The city pays the DOC $15 a day per offenders sentenced to work crews. It spent $704 to have 10 offenders on the work crew program the first three months of 2011.

The court's probation department keeps tabs on the people Portnoy sentences to work crews, receiving reports on each offender from DOC crew supervisors.

The city estimates it would have cost $8,200 to keep them in jail for just six weeks, Court Administrator Kelley Gradwohl said. 

Jail expenses account for 53 percent of the city’s criminal justice budget, city records show. It costs anwhere from $65 to $100 a day to jail an offender.

“I have always wanted to have more options in my choice of consequences,” Portnoy said. “And work crew is a good option.”

Portnoy has other sentencing options at her disposal as long as the offender isn’t convicted of repeated drunken driving offenses or other more serious crimes where the law forces offenders to serve a certain amount of jail time.

Her other sentencing options include electronic home detention, drug testing, spending time sitting in court, community restitution, or work release, in which offenders are allowed to work days and sleep in the jail at night. Some of these options may be better for some offenders who are physically unable to handle the work crew’s 8-hours of physical labor, Portnoy said,

People sentenced to the Seattle work crews could live anywhere in the Puget Sound region. What they have in common is that they’ve committed a crime in Lake Forest Park.

The DOC started the work crew program in 1995, strictly for correction department offenders. In 2004, Seattle’s municipal court became the first municipal entity to sign up for the program. Black Diamond and Federal Way followed with Lake Forest Park being the most recent participant.

“Governments don’t have the money that they used to (so) it is a real, visible and accountable alternative,” said Jim Thorburn, who supervises Seattle’s DOC work crews.

His crews average 20 men and women, with three to five crews in trucks or vans every day. A typical crew might consist of some Department of Corrections felons mixed with misdemeanants from Federal Way or Lake Forest Park, he said. They’ll pick up litter, improve parks, pick up illegally dumped items or clear vegetation.

“This time of year, we actually do a lot of vegetation cutting in the Rainier Valley,” Thorburn said. Crews have cut back sticker bushes near Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where drug dealers and prostitutes used the cover to make their deals, he added.

“It’s a great program; we’ve just been really fortunate to be a part of it,” Gradwohl said.