New prisons commissioner
has a plan

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

Charles Ramsey was treated a lot like a movie star for his first few weeks in Philadelphia.
The debutante police commissioner’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood tour of the city attracted thousands of residents along with a paparazzi-like media following.
On the other hand, when Tacony resident Louis Giorla effectively became Philadelphia’s new permanent prisons commissioner last week, most folks didn’t bat an eyelash.
It’s no wonder why people within the prison system have long lamented cynically that nobody really pays attention to them until there’s an escape. But according to the 51-year-old Giorla, the days are long gone when the city can simply lock up its lawbreakers and throw away the key.
On the contrary, inmate overpopulation is the top problem facing the man appointed by Mayor Michael Nutter to replace Leon A. King II as commander of the city’s last line of defense against chaos.
And considering the hard line adopted by Ramsey in his plans for dealing with offenders on the streets, Giorla’s task only figures to get tougher with time.
Nutter nominated Giorla for the job during a March 25 presentation at City Hall. Giorla’s appointment is pending confirmation of the prison system’s Board of Trustees, who are also mayoral appointees.
Giorla — a 1974 North Catholic graduate, 26-year prison system veteran and son of a former corrections officer — was named acting commissioner on Jan. 10, when King left the job without public comment three days after Nutter’s inauguration. King had served five years as commissioner.
Previously, Giorla had served as warden of the Riverside Correctional Facility and of Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, as well as a supervisor in the prison system’s internal affairs unit — now known as Professional Compliance — for a decade.
"It kind of found me," he said of his new job.
"At my age, I kind of thought I was approaching the end of my career. I was happy to be a warden. (But) if somebody tells you the mayor has asked you to do something, you’re not likely to turn him down."
Many factors impact the population issue, but all lead to one central challenge: keeping the number of inmates at or below the prison system’s capacity to house them.
The inmate population reached 9,258 on Oct. 9, an all-time high in the 320-year history of Philadelphia prisons and an increase of about 2,700 since January 2000.
As of March 26, the figure had declined to 9,138. However, the population generally begins to rise in the spring and peak in the fall. This year, the number will begin its annual climb at a level higher than prior years.
About 60 percent of city inmates are in pre-sentenced status. That is, they are charged with crimes or have been found guilty, but they await trial or formal sentencing.
The other 40 percent of inmates have been convicted and sentenced to "county time," that is, 23-1/2 months or less.
Of the 9,100-plus prisoners, about 8,700 are kept in city-owned facilities with the rest in the custody of outside jurisdictions and contractors, including Pennsylvania state prisons and county jails in Lehigh, Pa., and in Monmouth, N.J. In Fiscal Year 2008, the city is expected to pay $14.8 million to house inmates outside its own facilities.
Compared to other major cities, Philadelphia’s prison population is astronomical. New York, with 14,000 inmates, has a ratio of 571 citizens per inmate. Chicago, with 9,800 inmates, has a ratio of 540. Los Angeles has a ratio of 471 citizens per inmate with 21,000 county prisoners.
Philadelphia’s ratio is just 153 citizens per inmate.
The city’s prison system has 2,032 uniformed correctional officers and more than 2,500 employees in all.
Local officials have tried to keep pace with the growing population by operating the city’s prisons in excess of their designed capacity, but at a level they claim still adheres to the constitutional rights of inmates. They call it maximum capacity.
According to data in a Nov. 9 report authored by King and intended for Nutter, the designed capacity for the prison system’s nine in-house facilities is 6,150 inmates.
Prison officials add capacity by creating inmate quarters in areas of the prisons originally designed for other purposes and by adding additional beds into individual cells. According to King’s report, as many as 3,000 inmates may be living three-to-a-cell at any given time.
Nutter has given Giorla until April 24 to come up with a plan for short-, medium- and long-term reforms inside the prison system and the broader criminal justice system. Fortunately for the new commissioner, King did precisely that in his Nov. 9 report.
Giorla’s version will seek to deal with the overpopulation problem by reducing inmate recidivism with a broad-based community re-entry program, creating diversion programs for the system’s large homeless and mentally ill populations and employing so-called day-reporting programs for low-level non-violent offenders.
Building a new prison or re-populating the old Holmesburg Prison beyond a temporary holding facility are not under consideration, Giorla said.
The prison system has reported success with re-entry programs in the past, particularly in the areas of drug treatment, education and vocational training. But efforts have largely lacked standardization and coordination, according to the commissioner.
"Up until now, we’re tried to attack (recidivism) by throwing everything we had at it. Now we want to take a more analytical approach," Giorla said. "We need to standardize our services."
In 2007, the commissioner said, then-Mayor John Street opened the Mayor’s Office of Reentry for Ex-Offenders to work with ex-cons leaving city prisons and those getting out of prisons in other jurisdictions and settling in the city. Giorla hopes to forge a closer working relationship with that office to coordinate complementary programs and eliminate duplication of services.
Using the prison system’s reform of its own intake process in 2006 as an example, Giorla argues that better operational efficiency including the use of new technology could also help ease the population crunch.
The 2006 changes occurred in the wake of a lawsuit filed by inmates who claimed they were kept in inhumane conditions for days on end in overcrowded prison system holding cells and in police department jails around the city.
Prison officials blamed the backup on a shortage of long-term beds in city prisons. New inmates were forced to wait in the temporary cells until permanent beds opened up through the discharge of other inmates.
When the temporary cells filled, the prison system stopped taking new inmates altogether. As a result, some prisoners remained in police jails.
"Our intake process was the sore spot," Giorla said. "We’ve done so much in the last year to address that. It had gotten to the point where (inmates) used to spend three days in a holding cell. Now, it’s three to eight hours."
New computer systems can be used to process inmates faster and track them better. Technology can also help the system deploy correctional officers more efficiently. Anything to reduce the amount of time officers spend filling out paperwork can increase the amount of time spent watching inmates.
"The city’s new plan is ‘smarter, better, faster,’" Giorla said. "I think we have to increase the use of technology. (Officers’) basic job is observation, but they spend a lot of time doing clerical work." ••
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com