LOS ANGELES _ Alan Wurtzel met Carole Markin on Match.com in 2010. On their first date, he took her to coffee. After their second date, he walked Markin to her door, followed her inside and, she said, forced her to perform oral sex.
Wurtzel later claimed the act was consensual, but in 2011 he pleaded no contest to sexual battery and was sentenced to a year in jail. Markin was disappointed in the short sentence, but she still believed a measure of justice would be served with her assailant locked behind bars at the Los Angeles County Jail.
Instead, Wurtzel, who also had been convicted of sexual battery in a previous case, found a better option: For $100 a night, he was permitted by the court to avoid county jail entirely. He did his time in Seal Beach's small city jail, with amenities that included flat-screen TVs, a computer room and new beds. He served six months, at a cost of $18,250, according to jail records.
Markin learned about Wurtzel's upgraded jail stay only recently, from a reporter. "I feel like, 'Why did I go through this?'" she said.
In what is commonly called "pay-to-stay" or "private jail," a constellation of small city jails _ at least 26 of them in Los Angeles and Orange counties _ open their doors to defendants who can afford the option. But what started out as an antidote to overcrowding has evolved into a two-tiered justice system that allows people convicted of serious crimes to buy their way into safer and more comfortable jail stays.
An analysis by the Marshall Project and the Los Angeles Times of the more than 3,500 people who served time in Southern California's pay-to-stay programs from 2011 through 2015 found more than 160 participants who had been convicted of serious crimes including assault, robbery, domestic violence, battery, sexual assault, sexual abuse of children and possession of child pornography.
They include a hip-hop choreographer who had sex with an underage girl; a former Los Angeles police officer who stalked and threatened his ex-wife; and a college student who stabbed a man in the abdomen during a street scuffle.
Like Wurtzel, those defendants were convicted of felonies, which can end in a state prison sentence. But judges have the discretion to order some felony offenders to serve time in county jails. In those cases, judges can also allow a defendant to serve the time in a city jail.
Pay-to-stay jail assignments involve only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of inmates sent to detention centers in Southern California each year. But allowing some defendants to avoid the region's notoriously dangerous county jails has long rankled some in law enforcement who believe it runs counter to the spirit of equal justice.
The region's pay-to-stay jails took in nearly $7 million from the programs from 2011 through 2015, according to revenue figures provided by the cities. In attracting paying customers, some cities openly tout their facilities as safer, cleaner and with more modern amenities. The Santa Ana jail's website, for example, notes that jail is a "highly disruptive experience" and promotes its jail as a place where criminals can serve their time in a "less intimidating environment."
"The whole criminal justice system is becoming more and more about: How much money do you have? Can you afford better attorneys? Can you afford to pay for a nicer place to stay?" said John Eum, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department who investigated the hip-hop choreographer.
Pay-to-stay is not cheap. From 2011 through 2015, the average cost of a stay _ which can last from just one day to more than a year _ was $1,756.
The most expensive stay, according to jail records, was $72,050, paid by a man responsible for a drunken freeway crash that killed one of his passengers.
A racial breakdown of pay-to-stay participants could not be determined because complete data were unavailable.
Some defendants have done repeated stints in the pay-to-stay system, the analysis showed.
Wurtzel, a onetime real estate developer, was one of them. In 2004, six years before the assault on Markin, he was accused of sexually assaulting women he lured to his Pacific Palisades home through an ad for a live-in housekeeper. He pleaded no contest in 2007 to misdemeanor sexual battery of two women, one of whom was an undercover officer, and was sentenced to 135 weekends in jail. He split his time between Hawthorne's pay-to-stay jail at $75 a night and Glendale's jail, which then cost $85 a night.
Wurtzel declined to comment. His defense attorney, Robert Schwartz, said that pay-to-stay jails were the appropriate place for his client, a convicted sex offender then in his 60s. "There's a pecking order among inmates ... he's not somebody who would do well," said Schwartz. "It's still jail. There's still the loss of freedom." The judge in the case declined to comment.
Most pay-to-stay jails have a sales pitch centered around security, but defendants also comparison-shop like consumers for amenities and flexibility. After he pleaded no contest to statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl who attended his South L.A. church in 2011, Leonel Pelayo, then 45, compiled a list of every pay-to-stay jail he could find.
"County jail, you're verbally abused, physically abused by everybody," said Pelayo, who was a church leader. "I didn't want to spend one day there."
He eventually settled on the jail in Seal Beach, paying $18,250 for the privilege, jail records show.
"What I don't agree with is people saying that's not enough (punishment)," Pelayo said. "What's the concept of punishment? Is it the time, or getting beat up every other day in jail?"
