Earl Ofari Hutchinson

L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca vehemently says that there was absolutely no favoritism in granting Paris Hilton an early release. Despite the furious torrent of catcalls, name-calling, and finger pointing at the sheriff not to mention a recall petition and a demand by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for him to explain his action, Baca hasn’t budged an inch from his claim that the heiress got no special treatment. And he shouldn’t, because he’s right. Hilton didn’t get any special treatment.

Halle Berry, who’s African-American, was slapped with a misdemeanor charge for her hit and run accident that resulted in bodily injury to the other driver. She served no jail time. Actress Michelle Rodriguez, who’s Latina, got a 60-day jail sentence for DUI. She served two days less than Hilton.

One can quibble whether the sex pot heiress socialite faked her mental anguish to worm out of punishment, but that doesn’t change the fact that Baca has released thousands of prisoners from the L.A. County Jail, and the Board of Supervisors have barely uttered a peep of protest about it. They really can’t because they’re boxed in a corner. They can try to scrounge up millions more from their cash strapped budget for a crash jail building and expansion program, radically increase funding for drug and diversion programs, or send a tacit signal to the Sheriff’s and the LAPD to arrest thousands fewer offenders. Voters and taxpayers would scream bloody murder at the mere mention of doing any of these.

Whether Hilton’s psychological trauma is a bad case of Hiltonitis, meaning she faked it, or she really was in mental shambles at the horror of jail, is pointless to debate. She can’t get the kind of quality psychological care and treatment at the jail she needs. And neither can thousands of others that are warehoused in the jail that suffer acute and chronic mental ailments. Many of them, as Hilton, are non-violent, first time offenders and they were granted early release with no public fanfare or outcry about it.

An ACLU lawsuit, a federal court ruling, a federal consent decree, two studies, and countless protests by mental health reform advocates in the past few years have fingered the County’s pathetically understaffed and under-funded mental and medical health services. Baca has repeatedly shouted for upwards of $300 million more to revamp the L.A. County jail system predictable. Presumably, a part of that money would go to upgrade medical and mental health services at the jail. Baca has said that the supervisors and taxpayers are going to have to bite the dollar bullet and spend big to improve the jails. If that ever happened, it would momentarily eliminate the need for Baca to pick and choose which prisoners get released early and which ones languish behind bars.

The hard truth is that the prison riots, the dumping thousands of prisoners back on the streets, prisoner lawsuits, draconian budget slashes, and gross overcrowding have made the L.A. County jails the nation’s poster jail system for jail dysfunctionality. The jail mess has kept Baca and the supervisors squarely on the hot seat. Thus the sheriff’s relentless answer that the supervisors and the taxpayers cough up more money to hire more deputies, and expand the number of cells.
The overcrowding that plagues county jails is hardly exclusive to L.A. According to the Bureau of Justice figures, 650,000 persons are locked up every day in America’s jails. And more than 10 million are incarcerated every year. This has forced legislators and courts in other states to scramble madly to find more money for prisons or follow L.A. County’s example and shove more prisoners out the gates early.

Long before the Hilton furor, Baca took much heat for the early prisoner release program, and that’s also unfair. A much closer look at those released show that most were jailed for non-violent, misdemeanor offenses. That’s not to say that some of them didn’t pose a potential threat to public safety, but the reality is that it’s either release them or risk more inmate turmoil, lawsuits, and federal tampering with the jails. It’s not the choice that Baca, and the supervisors want to make. And it’s a choice that they wouldn’t have to make if they’d aggressively implement the reform programs that other cities and states are using used to help people turn their lives around. For a brief time that included California state prison officials.

The Hilton affair was a no-win for Baca. If he let her out early, as he has done with other non-violent, first time offenders, who served a fraction of their time, he’d be crucified by the public. As he has been. If he made her serve more of her sentence than other low level offenders that got early release he’d be crucified by her attorneys, Hilton family members, and maybe even some in the press. As it now stands, they’ve all nailed him to their cross.

Hilton is and continues to be a political football for anyone with an ax to grind and a hidden agenda about Baca, Hilton, the rich and famous, or the jail system. But Baca has nothing to be ashamed of. He got it right about Hilton. Unfortunately, the public hasn’t got it right about him or her.