SARASOTA -- Larry Labonte spent a month in the Sarasota County jail waiting for his trial before prosecutors dropped the misdemeanor battery charge against him.

But Labonte stayed in custody for an additional two days after a jail booking clerk misread the court paperwork that should have set him free.

Jail supervisors released Labonte and reprimanded the clerk for the mistake, but it is one of a dozen times in the past year where errors meant Sarasota County inmates have been released too early or held too long.

While experts on jail operations say that the number of errors is not a serious problem for a jail its size, the Sheriff's Office is searching for a way to eliminate the errors.

The 17 booking clerks are paid far less than deputies -- starting salary is $24,000 -- and they work at the ground floor of the criminal justice system.

Up to 50 of the newly arrested, sometimes still drunk or high on drugs, have to be questioned for basic information that is entered into a computer every night.

The clerks classify inmates based on medical issues or the charges, get them the appropriate jail garb, and log their clothes and property -- all while the arresting officers are pressuring them to get the task done so they can return to their beats.

Then there can be about 50 inmates going to court hearings, returning with handwritten instructions on court paperwork that tell them to change an inmate's bail, start the clock on a jail sentence or release the inmate.

"There's so many clerical things you have to do," said Thomas Rosazza, a criminal justice consultant in Colorado. "It's an intense process in terms of human interaction."

Five booking employees have been reprimanded and one booking supervisor resigned in the past year after internal investigations about errors, internal affairs records from the Sheriff's Office show.

Two inmates were released from jail even though they had active warrants out for their arrest. One man did not serve his five-day sentence for curbside drinking.

One judge had labeled a man a danger to the community and ordered him to remain in jail until a trial on DUI manslaughter and other charges. But the Herald-Tribune found a jailhouse paperwork snafu meant he walked out of the Sarasota County jail hours later. He has since been rearrested.

The sheriff's offices in Manatee and Charlotte counties say they have not had any mistaken releases in the past year.

The booking clerks at the Sarasota County jail are busier than ever because of a 14 percent increase in jail inmates, creating an environment where mistakes are more liable to happen, spokesman Lt. Chuck Lesaltato said. Because of turnover, there are new employees doing the job, he said.

There are the same number of booking clerks as three years ago.

And the Sheriff's Office found the booking desk spent 40 hours on the phone per week, answering questions about whether someone is in jail and how much it would take to bond them out.

"We looked into the amount of phone calls booking gets; it is a distraction," Lesaltato said.

The jail is researching an Internet-based system for the public and media to find that bond information, he said.

The Sheriff's Office now has a certified correctional officer in charge of the booking area. Booking supervisors used to be civilians.

The busy atmosphere played a part when a booking clerk released an inmate because she forgot he had four unserved warrants for violation of probation.

The clerk said that when she received the phone call from another deputy telling her about the warrants, "it was extremely busy in booking" and "it completely slipped her mind," Sheriff's Office records state.

Rosazza, the criminal justice consultant, said he has been hearing about more of these kinds of booking mistakes in the past few years.

"More and more people are being arrested, and that certainly puts stress on the intake and release process, so you're going to see mistakes," Rosazza said.

"I suspect if you found 11, there's probably more."

But he said there are many clerical things to do when processing inmates into and out of a jail and through the court system.

"It's a huge task for a jail and if we're talking about 11 people a year that were missed, I don't think that indicates to me a serious problem," Rosazza said.

In September, the Herald-Tribune found two inmates who were held too long, including a man charged with trying to escape the jail 11 days after he was supposed to be released.

That prompted Sheriff Bill Balkwill to order his jail staff to review files that day for all of the jail's 1,100 or so inmates to make sure no one else was being wrongly held. They found one more inmate who was there two days after he had finished his sentence.

The Sheriff's Office at that time said it was looking into the booking area to see if there was a better way to handle things to avoid those mistakes.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20070723/NEWS/707230341/1006/section?CATEGORY=NEWS0103