At a recent meeting of Auburn leaders and the King County District Court, City officials estimated that the $3.8 million the City paid into the misdemeanant SCORE jail in Des Moines in 2010 could swell to $7.1 million by 2013.

Determined to avoid an increase like that, City leaders have been eyeballing cost-cutting measures.

So far, so good, says Auburn Municipal Court Judge Pat Burns.

What puzzles the judge, however, is why City leaders have trained their eyeballs on Auburn’s Municipal Court.

Why, Burns asks, are Auburn’s leaders talking about contracting court services to King County District Court, even though, he says, Auburn’s court isn’t responsible for the jail or its cost increases?

In their laudable zeal to cost costs, Burns argues, City leaders have wrongly conflated the rising costs of the SCORE jail with the separate issue of Auburn’s court. The Auburn court budget, Burns claims, hasn’t increased significantly in years.

“I do not understand why they are lumping our court in with this,” Burns said. “They are well aware that the court doesn’t operate the jail, never has operated the jail. I don’t arrest people, I’ve never arrested anybody. I’ve never investigated a crime. My job is to take a look at the people in jail and figure out what the circumstances are to release them and get them out of jail.

“… I confess,” Burns added, “this is all confusing to me.”

Further flummoxing the judge is that the least expensive method of operating Auburn’s Municipal Court, he said, may save the City perhaps $600,000 or $700,000 but wouldn’t amount to even a third of the $3.25 million the City hopes to make up.

Burns (pictured left) said he believes that the City would better serve its residents by maintaining local control of the court, not contracting it out. He bases his case upon the court’s demonstrated sensitivity to the community it serves and a 50-percent drop in the crime rate evidenced over the last 10 years.

“What we have been doing with the Auburn court is focusing on getting people to change their behavior to get the crime rate down, and we’ve been really successful with it,” Burns said.

Burns cited poverty rate and crime indexes — measures of the socio-economic vitality of a community — showing Auburn at the bottom, or close to it, of the scale in King County.

“When you look at the indices and the crime rate, you might figure it would be a difficult thing to get control of the crime rate in a community like that,” Burns said. “But we’ve been able to get control of that. A big part of how we’ve done that is by focusing on changing people’s behaviors.”

And that, he said, is where the court’s probation services come into play. Probation services, he said, account for the greatest difference in costs between what King County District is proposing to do and what Auburn Municipal Court does.

King County District Court, Burns said, has 26 judges but operates with the minimal staffing of 10 probation officers. Auburn, by contrast, has eight probation officers and is reputed to be the most aggressive department in the county.

What it nets the people of Auburn is extensive use of electronic home monitoring, enough staff to ensure that people report to their probation officers twice a month, and that people with significant drug and alcohol problems undergo urinary analyses, including random UAs, two to three times a week.

That advantage, Burns said, enables Auburn’s court to focus on people with actual significant alcohol and drug issues and get them into private treatment programs or into in-patient-treatment programs.

In plain terms, he said, that means keeping people out of jail.

“We release 300 to 400 people to in-patient treatment programs and probably put another four or five times that into out-patient treatment programs every year,” Burns said. “We take a similar approach for people with mental illness issues. In the last year we released 50 people to in-patient mental health treatment programs. We monitor a lot of others to make sure they are seeing their mental health providers and taking their medications, that they have a home, that they are not on the streets. That ability to monitor them and aid them in getting the resources they need is a huge advantage, and it’s the difference in how we can help people get off the streets and stop them from committing crimes.”

Long, costly says

In recent meetings City leaders have expressed concern with what they say are comparatively longer, and therefore more costly, stays for Auburn inmates in the SCORE jail.

“It is the decision of the judge,” said Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis. “It is a practice that the judge will have far more people out on probation. For instance, in some of the neighboring cities a court sentence might be six months and the person will go to jail for six months. Here the judge may sentence somebody to a year and put them on probation, but if they offend, they go to jail for the full year. When you are dealing with somebody who has a drug or alcohol problem, the chances of them reoffending are far higher.

“There’s a decision the Council has to make,” Lewis said. “King County District Court put together its proposal and the judge put together his, but it’s a difference in philosophy. The Council’s really got to look at it.

“King County and our south end cities and SCORE are using what’s called ‘Swift but Sure.'” Lewis said. “In the first place, you’ve got 95 percent of the people who just do the right thing, automatically. So you’re dealing with about 5 percent of the people. They’re not bad people, they just did dumb things or made a mistake. The idea is that you don’t put those people in for a long period of time. You put them in jail, you show them why they don’t ever, ever want to do that again, and you get them out of there before they become acclimatized to being a criminal.

“That’s what King County has been doing and what the cities that contract with King County like Kent and Renton and Federal Way believe has kept their rate down,” Lewis said. “They have higher populations but much fewer people in jail than we do. We believe that that ‘Swift but Sure’ sentencing has made the difference.”

Burns called the numbers “fallacious.” The real issue, he said, is that at any particular time, 30- to 40 percent of the people sitting in jail are waiting to be released to in-patient treatment programs. The Auburn court’s response, in those circumstances, is to impose the entire sentence.

“Usually, it’s 30 to 35 days before we can get them into an in-patient treatment program. But for some people, like sex offenders, it’s really hard to find those guys a bed. They can be sitting in there 60 to 90 days before they get a bed date,” Burns said. “So we just impose a balance of sentence because it’s easier to do that than to impose a sentence of 10 days and set up another hearing and so on. That cycle of hearings just creates work for everybody. This is why that number is high, but that number isn’t reflective of the reality of how long people are sitting in jail.

“… King County doesn’t focus on issues like alcohol and mental health, and those sorts of issues. They don’t focus on the issues. For them, it’s all about grinding people through,” he said. “King County keeps its jail numbers down because they’re not trying to put people in jail — they’re just trying to do the minimum they can to make the system function

“The basic question is this: is that the kind of system Auburn wants? If they want that kind of system, I can only operate with the resources I have. But if they do that, what they are going to get is a lot higher crime rate,” Burns said. “In essence, the taxpayers are going to pay it through the taxes they pay the city, or they’re going to end up paying it when they get robbed. It’s a policy decision the Council has got to make — who do they want to foist the cost of the criminal justice system onto?”