I was unable to attend yesterday's hearings, but I did catch the news coverage. I also watched a bit on television, and I gather there was a medium-sized scene involving the Vera Pretrial Services program at Orleans Parish Prison. I did attend today, and it came up again during the New Orleans Police Department budget.

On both days, audience members were subjected to frequent comparisons between Vera's Pretrial Services program and the "disastrous" Pretrial Services Division in Philadelphia.

Similar names, but these are two quite different things.

In 2009, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an investigative series on the local criminal justice system, including its Pretrial Service Division, implemented in 1969 as a reform to the city's bail system. Among the Inquirer's findings: local courts had 47,000 fugitives and more than $1 billion in bail debt on their hands.

During yesterday's and today's hearings, the Inquirer article came up repeatedly — from council members today and public speakers, several from the bail industry, yesterday — a cautionary tale used to discourage the continued funding of the Vera program. But here's the problem: The comparison doesn't really hold up. If one were to actually read the article, he or she would see as much. For one, Pretrial Service in Philadelphia was a replacement of the commercial bail industry. The city effectively banned bail bondsmen, funding and administering bail itself, as well removing an entire industry that serves as a resource in minimizing failures-to-appear and finding bail jumpers.

None of that is happening here. Vera Pretrial Services, which is funded at $184,000 in Mayor Mitch Landrieu's latest budget proposal, is not replacing commercial bail.

None of this is to say that the merits (or lack thereof) of the program aren't worth discussing. But let's talk about it on its merits rather than panic or exaggerate. If Vera's risk assessment model is faulty, that's a problem. If defendants are being released based on Vera assessments and failing to show up to court, that's a problem, likewise if judges come to trust the risk assessments above their own judgement. And maybe this shouldn't be a contract. Maybe it should be run directly by the city, using city employees.

And the bail industry should have a say here. While Vera New Orleans is not, to my knowledge, explicitly committed to "eliminating the commercial bail industry," as one speaker charged last night, a 2007 Vera report on the New Orleans criminal justice system did refer, in its "best practices" section, to some models elsewhere (not Philadelphia) that replaced commercial bail with something else.

However, Vera Pretrial Services is not the same thing as the Philadelphia Pretrial Services Division.

(More after the jump)

Day Three's agenda: libraries, parks, trash, drugs, bugs, buses, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll.

First up this afternoon was city librarian Charles Brown, the new director of the New Orleans Public Library who has helmed a stellar year for the city's library system: several branches reopened, and visitors are up more than 30 percent than last year (and 2012 isn't over yet). It kicked off literacy and school readiness programs, including a teen outreach summer reading program with more than 650 teens.

In 2013, it aims for more youth outreach, more technology use (computers are in demand), and more programs for new American citizens or soon-to-be-citizens.

The city's general fund once again does not set aside funds for NOPL, so it'll have to rely on its millage (from which it receives $8 million annually) and its reserve. This year, the reserve has $8 million — it's expected to dwindle to $4.5 million in 2013, and $604.209 by 2014, according to Brown.

Its Main Library also needs help: the near-capacity city archives are not climate controlled and have no advanced security and are "constantly in danger of being literally destroyed," Brown said. The library itself has had "no overall renovation" since its opening in 1958. The Loyola Avenue renovations could make the Main Library a star, Brown said, but instead it's "an island of blight."