Howard County Council members are wondering where all the court-ordered community service "volunteers" will go.
People given alcohol citations, convicted of traffic violations or disorderly conduct are sometimes ordered to clean parks or vacant lots, or help nonprofits as a condition of probation or instead of receiving points on their driving records, but county Sheriff James Fitzgerald said the program doesn't work and he wants to end it July 1.
According to Fitzgerald, judges are referring only three or four people per day to the alternative sentencing program run through his office, so he wants to eliminate the program's four jobs for a savings to the county of $466,743 in this recession year. County Executive Ken Ulman took the suggestion and listed the four positions among the nine layoffs he's proposing.
"When you have three or four clients coming in a day, and you have people [employees] sitting there," it just doesn't pay, Fitzgerald said. The program is 14 years old, he added.
"Many of these programs work for three or four years," but not over the long haul, he said.
He said juvenile offenders have been routed through the state's Department of Juvenile Services for more than a year, and he's found many nonprofits or county agencies don't want youthful offenders as volunteers because they often fail to appear, sneak out early, don't do the work or are angry and disruptive.
The one District Court judge who sent the most people to community services doesn't do traffic cases anymore, he said.
"The judges used to send the people down there. We can't tell judges what to do. They're sending very few clients down," he said.
But Neil Dorsey, the 13-year former director of the program, denounced the idea of ending it in a letter to Ulman and the five council members, charging that Fitzgerald, who won his post in the November 2006 election, has undermined the program since taking office.
He said later that until he retired Nov. 30, 2006, the program was getting between 1,800 and 2,000 adults a year, plus more than 600 juveniles. Those people averaged 30,000 hours a year of volunteer work to the county and area nonprofits.
The program worked well, he said, but charged that Fitzgerald, a retired county police officer and police union president, has discouraged county judges and other officials from using it and moved it away from the courts to an inconvenient location in the Dorsey building off Bendix Road in Columbia.
