Travis County Commssioners Court
September 9, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 29
Item number 29 is to receive update on Travis County criminal courts at law jail reduction docket. And we do have some judges here with us. We appreciate y'all coming over. And also the report that we received.
>> good afternoon, judges and Commissioners. It's a pleasure to be here, and we're all here from the county courts at law except judge phillips, who is handling the docket, and judge we land, who would not be here today. First of all, it is always a pleasure to be here in front of you. What I want to say and start it out with is it is often said that there is no failure except without trying. It is our philosophy that the county court at law judges try to approve the jail call system. As you can recall back in February we started working with affected departments. That includes the sheriff, pretrial services, probation, county attorney and the criminal defense bar. In doing that we looked at a collaborative effort to continue current jail reduction initiatives to reduce pretrial stays in the county jail, to decrease transportation costs to the sheriff's office. And also to provide uniform and predictable jail call practices for all affected departments, the judges and the criminal defense practitioners. So the jail reduction docket was implemented as a pilot project in early may and continued until the end of August. On behalf of the county court at law judges, I am happy to report that we have come to the conclusion based on the effectiveness of jail reduction docket to continue it. At the end of the four-mont period, the court administration compared the different jail call systems with the jail reduction docket, and debra will be going over those results with you in just a minute. The bottom line is that the jail reduction docket, we have increased the transition rate, decreased the average number of days in jail. Before I turn it over to debra, the criminal court administrator, I want to discuss those comparisons. I want to say on behalf of all the judges, thank you to everyone for their efforts and teamwork in making this work, and in particular I want to thank debra and her employees, the judges, the individual court staff, the shrif and her deputies, pretrial and probation departments and the county attorneys. Without thifer willing -- their willingness to work together and to arrive at a collaborative effort, this program would not have worked. I'm now going to turn it over to debra.
>> I had provided some backup material, which you should have up there with you. I wanted to bring your attention to that. Before we started our d docket in may of 2003, judge Biscoe as asked us as part of the overcrowding taskforce to do an analysis at the end of this pilot to see how it had worked in comparison to prior jail call systems that we had tried in the courts in the pass. We looked at two of them. One of them many of you may remember, and that was the large joint jail call that was held at about 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon in the old jail prior to January of 2002. And that joint jail call was held for years. After that the judge held a jail call each in their own separate courts individually, and that went from January of '02 all the way until we started the pilot on may 5th of 2003. If you'll look at your backups, on table 1 on this backup compares the large joint jail call with the pilot. We looked at a three-month period from may through July of 2001 with a comparable period during the jail reduction docket, may through July of 2003. The most significant difference in comparison of these two was in transportation. As you can see by looking at the very first line, the numbers set to appear, between may and July of 2001 the courts were bringing over an average of 2,000 inmates per month, which averages out to about 90 inmates a day. And during the jail reduction docket pilot, we were bringing over an average of about 640 inmates a month, which is more like 30 inmates per day, which is a very significant reduction and really impacts the transportation. And also the other thing was as far as the disposition rate, even though we were bringing over an average of 2,000, we were only disposing of about 23% of the cases we brought, so there was a lot of bringing people back and forth and resetting cases under the old jail call system. Under the new system our average disposition rate is about 73%, which is much higher than it was before, plus we're bringing over many fewer inmates. I'm going to skip to table 3, and this compares the individual jail calls held in the courts, which happened after January of '02 and up until may, versus the pilot. And this just shows a snap shot of at any given time inmates through trial in the county courts and how long they've been sitting in jail from arrest. And on that chart you can see the very first line shows that for the county court at law at large, from February through April people were sitting in jail an average of 21 days. After the pilot started may 9 through 7-25 they were sitting in jail an average of 15 days, which is a 27% reduction. And this is, begin, comparing the -- again, comparing the individual courts doing jail calls versus the jail reduction docket. On the very last page, again, this is table 4. It's also comparing the individual jail call with the pilot, and this is actually showing the total dispositions for the courts, so not just the jail cases, but the overall disposition that are reported to the main office of court administration. And you can see in 2003 when we were doing the combined jail call, the jail reduction docket, we had an average of 16% increase in dispositions overall in the cases in the courts, which are real significant when you look at the numbers of cases that i've disposed of in the courts -- that are disposed of in the courts. And lastly i'd like to turn to table 2, which was on your first page, which I think the judges would agree is the most significant statistic so far. And this is again looking at from June of '01 the comparison of all the jail dockets for that month versus June of '03, which is when we were doing the jail reduction docket, and we actually manually counted cases on the docket and found that from arrest to disposition, inmates were in jail in June of 2001 with the large old jail call 45 days or six weeks. In June of 2003 under the pilot, the average period of time from arrest to disposition from the jail cases is a week, seven days, which is an 84% reduction. So I think from looking at the stats and comparing the two different jail call systems that the judges have utilized in the past, clearly the pilot program has been very successful.
>> these are all misdemeanor cases?
>> yes.
>> but a variety of them, some looking more serious than others, actually.
>> what's the lowest misdemeanor and where do you cross with the highest misdemeanor?
>> of the types that are dealt with in this jail call? Class b, 180 days maximum sentence. There are some that are 30 days, but essentially six months for a class a which is one yeerks and then you move into the state jail and higher felonies, several years.
>> an example of a class b would be driving with a license suspended?
>> yes, sir. That's probably one of the biggest ones we see, pi, public intoxication, dwls public intoxication, dwls , driving with suspended license. The class a's would be the assault, family violence, subsequent d.w.i.'s, a larger theft, those things.
>> this was actually a question that Commissioner Daugherty raised when we were going through budget, but it was a very good one. And it had to do with the waiving of court costs and the impact that that might be having to our bottom line here that in trying to get this stuff moved through as an incentive, are we indeed -- do we have some -- what do we know about the waiving of court costs, which actually is one of the very few ways that we've got to offset some of the costs that we incur. Incur?
>> the cases that are there are people that are indigent or in jail. These are not people that are paying court costs. In my court -- I don't want to speak for everybody -- but I only waive court costs for people that are not getting out of jail. So what happens is if you throw in the court costs, they'll stay another four on or five days in jail. So not only are we getting the court cost, we have the added expense of having these people constituent sit in jail for another four or five days. So as far as I'm concerned there is no impact. You are not going get court costs out of these people. It's not letting them out of jail and thethey have time to pay court costs. The jail will not let them out until the court costs are paid, and usually you just serve them out.
>> the effect is the same. We're running them concurrent. They're serving their jail time at the same time they're sitting out their costs. Anyone with a sentence of a few days is covering the court costs. Somebody that's placed on probation that's going to be expected to pay court costs unless there's been a financial study that they they can't.
>> I think that has an impact on the jail. With the jail call we plead out 50 people and we run court costs concurrent on every case, there's definitely an impact on the jail. It may be a couple of days for 40 or 50 pile people, but that adds up.
>> so when I see disposition, I shouldn't think that a dflt immediately walks out of court. The disposition may be 15 days in jail. That means your 15 days starts running or nltion you've got time -- or unless you've got time already credited.
>> yes, sir.
>> so it's immediate justice basically.
>> at the time of disposition, if you've got to serve 60 days, wenow your time is 60 days.
>> within a week.
>> if you've been in jail 30 days, then you've steferbd.
>> but under the old averages where it was 45 days, that guy that would have got 30 days, would have sat in jail for 15 more days until he got before a judge.
>> so the plea would have typically been for time served.
>> yes, sir.
>> so the recommendation is to continue this?
>> we're continuing.
>> and early on there were some issues that we weren't certain about, and the motion was to take a look at those over the pilot period. And one of them was really whether this could withstand this kind of different work over a long period of time. And I guess your conclusion is you can fit it into your schedules?
>> yes. I think that now --
>> the reason that the judges went away from the cattle call we used to call it, jail call, is that it wasn't very efficient. And you can see by the numbers. We're bringing people over and over and over. When we decided to do jail reduction, we specifically do it with cases, for example, that have no felonies, that there's no reason to bring an inmate over because they're still going to be in jail because they have higher cases that are not going to get disposed of. So we're trying to get the people that will be disposed of, that we can get out of jail, that would have gotten out of jail regardless. And we don't reset all the time. So there's much more responsibility over the cases and it's focusing on the ones that can be resolved quickly as opposed to the ones that are not going to be able to be resolved. So it's very precise. And we've come to an agreement to do with it the procedure where everybody can move along and do it okay without having to worry about once again having thousands of main mates brought -- inmates brought over.
>> judge, we actually set out the procedures which I know they'll be forwarded to you, and I think those procedures have helped make this have very uniform and effective practice. I think that's what makes it so efficient in each of the courts.
>> those procedures and guidelines we've also shared with the defense counsel counsel who appear in our court, which helps. Of how we're all handling the cases uniformly.
>> and there's still a culture change going o we have have been approached by the defense bar, they want to talk to us about some of these procedures. So we're still leveling it out, but --
>> there were some transportation glitches discussed in the last taskforce meeting that attended. Are we still working through those?
>> yes, sir. And we have jail call this week and the sheriff's folks are working hard to make this work and martinez he's people are striving to make it work. They deserve a major pat on the back.
>> and on another point before we get too far, there are other issues that relate to jail call and senate bill 7. And one thing that we've been talking about forming or establishing a committee, and in that committee we'll review ways to address the increasing costs of attorneys' fees. And so we'll look at that. And some of these other issues as well as the use of video fees and jail reduction docket, which I know judge denton is doing and as well as some of the other judges are considering.
>> and I think it stands to the heart of what is justice. If somebody has a 30-day sentence, they ought to know that they're going to serve 30 days ahead of them, as opposed they've already served days and find out they served their sentence before it's been imposed thoam. It's a better definition of justice. And that's a real miscarriage of justice.
>> you know, the county attorney's office plays a critical element in this too. I think the whole culture that we're trying to encourage is that we look at the case early on and you might get a reduced plea bargain offer in exchange for disposing of your case early. So I think that's definitely contributing and the county attorney's has definitely been cooperative with the whole justice system in terms of that. And I think that we're providing crisper justice.
>> well, we certainly appreciate your help on this. We've made dramatic progress in my view, and the results though show it. So thank y'all are. We appreciate it.
Last Modified: Wednesday, September 9, 2003 7:52 AM