By Dianne Anderson

Cuts to close debilitating budget deficits must come from somewhere, and that somewhere usually means where poor people – translate: Black and Brown people -- need it the most on their way to the prison system.

Currently, Blacks make up only 13 percent of the general population, but they comprise half of the 2.3 million Americans now behind bars.

Locally, San Bernardino County is looking to cut 39 public defender positions. In Riverside county, Gary Windom is bracing for a 25 percent reduction at his Public Defender's office.

Windom, Riverside County’ chief public defender, said that whenever staff is cut, work is piled high for lawyers and staff that remain, but that cuts can be more costly in the long run.

One Las Vegas case, as well as wrongful incarceration cases in other states, are hitting jurisdictions with lawsuits for failure to provide appropriate representation under the Constitutional Fourth Amendment.

“There is a substantial risk of the county being held responsible for not providing adequate resources and manpower to handle these kinds of cases,” said Windom, also chair of the California Public Defenders Association. “What they’re [clients] doing is getting civil lawyers, ACLU and others, that come in and actually do class action or individual action lawsuits.”

Eliminating public defender staff in Riverside County is expected to be a costly “collateral impact,” at about $230 for every continuance, coming to roughly $4 million, he said.  The cost of expert witnesses, sheriffs, overtime, and the cost to keep people in jail cells runs about $175 a day.

“That was another $13 or $14 million collateral cost for cutting the public defender’s office,” Windom said, adding that it will costs the county about $15 million to not have the public defenders handle the cases. “It costs money for the delay that the victims and people accused of the crime have to come back [to court] so many times.”

Still, good alternatives can help keep people out of the system, he said. In Ventura County, a work furlough program for low grade misdemeanors and minor infractions allows offenders to work during the day and pay to sleep at the Oxnard Air Force Base at night. It costs the county nothing.

“But it frees up jail beds for those who need to be in jail. Those are collateral alternatives that can save money,” he said.

As an example of just how wasteful the system gets, Windom also cited last year’s case where a man cut some small pieces of cactus out of a roadside cactus plant, which ended up going to trial.

“He was arrested and we had to litigate that,” he said. “And we’re saying, my goodness, ‘a cactus plant?’”

The cost of snipping from that plant was about $1, and it ended up being a three-day trial, he said. “The guy was found not guilty on that particular one. It cost about $1,500 a day for the trial.”

David Carroll, director of research and evaluations for Defender Legal Services at the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, said the cuts are a continuing national problem in the bad economy.

California is only one of seven states that trial level representation is required to be a county function, he said. The problem is that sometimes county administration is not as up to speed on constitutional requirements.

“You get these dramatic cuts at times but it’s really cutting off one’s nose to spite the face,” Carroll said. “You have to provide counsel for anyone who can’t afford it, facing potential jail time. Cutting public defenders doesn’t mean that the cases are going away.”

Usually, he said, cost efficiency is built into the Public Defender’s office with attorneys already specialized in trial areas. Hiring or farming out private attorneys is an overload on case load, and ends up costing more money down the line for defense.

“If you go to the private bar, you’re paying by the hour,” he said. “Inevitably it’s going to be more costly than running a public defender’s office.”

Carroll said many public defenders’ offices currently exceed the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals that call for an attorney not to exceed maximum cases per year for their area of law. A felony attorney, for instance, should not exceed 150 felony cases, or 400 for misdemeanors, 200 juvenile delinquencies, or 25 appeals at one time.

However, usually public defenders are expected to be overloaded, but he said it’s a sacrifice of ethical duty that they owe their clients.

He’s also concerned about the growing number of large settlements facing states and counties because clients were given ineffective counsel, and wrongfully incarcerated.

“In Clark County, Nevada, there was recently a $5 million settlement because of how the public defender’s office was expected to function on so little money,” he said. “There’s a lot of potential problems here.”