Up to one-third of the 12,000 inmates in Los Angeles County jails can’t get to their court appearances because of a shortage of functioning buses, and county supervisors this week advanced a proposal to try and fix the problem.
The LA County Sheriff’s Department currently has only 23 operable buses out of a total of 82, and there have been days when as few as six were running, supervisors said.
Officials said the breakdown of the inmate transportation system has kept the county’s seven jails overcrowded with incarcerated people who might have been released by a judge or sentenced to a state prison — if they had appeared in court.
“Transportation should not be a barrier to administering justice. Having individuals sit in our jails because we can’t transport them to court is simply unacceptable,” Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to implement an interim plan to get more working buses running from jails to courthouses and medical appointments. It includes borrowing vehicles from neighboring counties and asking the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to help transport inmates to state prisons.
The money isn’t the problem. It’s people skimming off the top of the prison industry that are the problem.
A business lease and insurance on an F150 is going to run you around 10-20k a year.
Maybe. If they’re spending 3x to 4x and have less than a quarter of the fleet functioning, that does seem like a kind of large discrepancy. I’d kind of want to see what the correlation with age is, and the bus age.
That might be true, but the $1.2m to $1.6m per year figure is maintenance, which is a different expense from financing on the bus or insurance; they shouldn’t be directly comparable. Someone isn’t going to average $10-20k a year on maintenance for an F150 (or at least I’d hope they aren’t).
EDIT: apparently this has been an ongoing problem. This article says that availability was down to close to 60% in 2022.
https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/nearly-40-of-lasd-jail-buses-are-out-of-service-and-some-incarcerated-people-are-missing-court-dates
It also has the name of the company that does the maintenance; it’s apparently not a part of the sheriff’s office.
They interviewed a mechanic that chalked it up to COVID-19:
The Sheriff’s Department said that the problem was that it hadn’t bought new busses for five years:
But my point is, somehow in two years, they apparently went from a little over 60% availability, which was considered a newsworthy concern then, to something like 7% at the nadir to apparently 28% now.
I don’t think that matters, because it’s not an excuse. If the buses are expensive to maintain because they’re old, then the negligence or corruption simply stems from failing to replace the buses in a timely fashion instead of failing to maintain them. Either way, the people in charge are to blame.