A Los Angeles judge last week ordered Actress Lindsay Lohan to spend time at the county morgue and a hospital emergency room as part of her sentence on a misdemeanor drunken driving charge. Lohan last year was sentenced to one day and served 84 minutes as part of a plea deal. But to the casual observer, spending less than two hours in jail followed by two four-hour days at the morgue seem like light punishment for Lohan's crime.
As with Paris Hilton before her, there's a sense that Lohan is getting a better deal than the average citizen. But consider:
- Los Angeles County has a jail capacity of 20,000 beds. At any given time, between 1,200 and 1,500 of those beds are occupied by state prisoners, because state prisons are overcrowded, too.
- According to the California State Sheriffs' Association, about 230,000 county jail inmates were released statewide before the end of their terms in 2005 because of overcrowding at the local levels.
- Thirty-two California counties, including Los Angeles, operate under court-ordered inmate population caps. To comply, the L.A. County Sheriff regularly places the least dangerous offenders on voluntary house arrest, and other prisoners often serve as little as 25 percent of their sentences.
- The deputy district attorney who prosecuted Lohan confirms that such alternative sentencing programs are routine: “(Lohan) is getting what everyone else would get,” Deputy District Attorney Danette Meyers said in August.
If California's county jails had more space, it's much more likely that celebrity wrongdoers would be serving their sentences behind bars, not under house arrest or in the morgue.
Thoughts