DuPage Sheriff Richard Doria says he has plenty of muscle-straining, sweat-inducing jobs available to those who break the law.
To fill those jobs, the sheriff has asked a County Board subcommittee to give him about $140,000 in seed money to start a program in which prisoners can do manual labor to avoid jail time.
The Sheriff’s Work Alternative Program is based on the 10-year experience of Cook County Sheriff’s Department, which each year has about 7,000 people in its program.
“People want to stay out of jail, and we should have a good program that makes them work hard-but some work that repays the community where they committed the crime,” Doria recently told the Alternative Sentencing Subcommittee.
The subcommittee has sent the proposal on to the Judicial and Public Safety Committee, whose members generally sounded enthusiastic about the program but postponed sending it to the full County Board until several budgetary problems were answered.
Currently, DuPage’s criminal judges can sentence a convicted person to either jail time or community service with a non-for-profit agency.
Doria believes that the SWAP program will entail much harder physical labor than community service. SWAP participants will pay the county $1 an hour for participating in the program.
“The judges want a tougher tool than community service, and if someone misbehaves, we still have the cell door to knock them on the rear,” Doria said.
In community service, a participant usually is unsupervised by anyone except a member of the private organization. But the SWAP program calls for specially trained sheriff’s deputies to provide on-site supervision, paid for by the fees that the convicts pay.
Cook County said that although about half of its SWAP offenders are poor and can’t pay the fee, the program still pays for itself.
“I’m careful in government to say that anything pays for itself, but once we have the seed money we are requesting, it looks like it has a good chance to do just that,” Doria said.
The program started in Cook County for people found guilty of a second charge of drunken driving. It has expanded to include many people convicted of misdemeanor and felony crimes other than violent or sex offenses.
Doria said he anticipated starting the DuPage program with 15 to 30 people.
John Zaruba, chief deputy sheriff, said the purpose of the program is to save money by keeping people out of the county jail and to provide judges with an alternative means of punishment.
Chief Judge Edward Kowal and State’s Atty. James Ryan both have expressed interest.
Cook County Sheriff’s Capt. Dan Lavery, director of that county’s SWAP program, said that the “program actually works and it saves money.”
For instance, Lavery said, the Cook County Sheriff’s Department used to pay $50 each to have the department’s buses washed commercially. But now SWAP participants wash the inside and outside of the 40 buses once a week at no cost to the sheriff’s office. He estimated the annual savings at $100,000.
“Our experience with the drunk driving participants also shows that recidivism is at 3 percent, an amazingly low figure,” he added.
Some jobs targeted for SWAP participants include snow-removal, weed-pulling, stream-clearing, window-washing, cleaning trucks and general road cleanup.
Lavery said that the Cook County SWAP program has been successful enough that county officials there are considering a similar program for teenagers.
Lavery said the Cook County experience shows that about 25 percent of those sentenced to SWAP either don’t show up or violate some other rule and get sent back to court, where a judge either lengthens the number of days the prisoner is sentenced to SWAP, or the prisoner is sent to jail.
Zaruba said that there currently are 62 people in the county jail (50 men and 12 women) who could be involved in the program.
“Hard labor makes up most of the work, but we try to use an individual’s skill,” Lavery said. “In one case we had a lawyer teaching legal classes to police officers.”
