The Rev. Ronald Williams says the sheriff's study shows a host of problems.

by NICK BUDNICK
nbudnick@wweek.com

Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Noelle isn't real big on repeat customers. So, when the county's top jailer got a recent draft report, he was troubled. Among the statistics was someone who, on average, gets booked into his jails every 23 days. And, in a stereotype-busting development, the county's top jailbird turned out to be a woman.

The unnamed woman was unearthed in a new study initiated by Noelle that will be released later this month. The Booking Frequency Project began as a simple snapshot of what Noelle has dubbed "frequent fliers," the jails' top 20 detainees. But it has since turned into a groundbreaking multi-agency study that aims to wed two worlds that are usually discussed in isolation: criminal justice and social policy.

The findings are remarkable:

* In the five years studied, the top 20 repeat offenders averaged 54 bookings.

* The 20 frequent fliers spent a combined 12,712 days, or 35 percent of each year on average, behind bars.

* All 20 top offenders had extensive drug records; six had a "serious psychiatric diagnosis."

* Of the top 20 detainees, 16 were black.

* The county spent, on average, $70,000 for booking and jailing each of the top 20 during the five-year study. No estimates were made on the cost to police, courts or social services.

"There are people going through the system over and over and over again and nothing's being addressed," says Noelle, who believes a broader approach is needed. "The mental-health system is broken, and everybody recognizes that. But just a new mental-health system isn't going to bring in housing, special needs and drug and alcohol treatment."

The project is the result of expeditions that Noelle's two analysts, Bethany Wurtz and Larry Reilly, made into Multnomah County's new criminal-justice computer data warehouse. Since the preliminary results came in, Noelle has been discussing the results with local officials and community leaders, such as the Rev. Ronald Williams of Bethel AME Church in Northeast Portland.

The fact that 80 percent of the top repeat offenders are African Americans shows that "the system has failed," said Williams, who chairs a task force that's looking into minority overrepresentation in the criminal-justice system. "There is something wrong with the social service system that permits this to happen."

That's why officials from mental health, drug treatment and parole and probation programs, as well as housing groups, are participating in the study, which has already extended beyond the top 20 "frequent fliers." They will be sharing mental-health and drug-treatment information on the individuals and conducting interviews to find out what treatment programs work and don't work.

From Noelle's perspective, the motive for the study is purely economic. In booking and housing costs, the top 20 cost the county jails $1.4 million in that five-year period. Those costs are multiplied across society when police departments, courts and parole officers are factored in.

"There's a huge cost here," said Noelle, adding that whatever the solution is, "it's got to be cheaper than constantly pushing them through this system with all the extra costs."

In addition to fueling the discussions over racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the study can't help but highlight the costs of the "drug war" in Multnomah County. That's because more than half of the "frequent fliers'" bookings are "trespass" arrests, probably stemming from Portland's controversial drug-free zones. Under the city's code, people suspected of drug activity can be banned from a geographical area and arrested if they simply cross into such a zone.

Jim Hennings, executive director of Metropolitan Public Defender Services, says the findings regarding drug offenders reinforce his views: "I personally believe that drugs are a health problem primarily, and we should be looking at it as a health problem."