Michelle Rodriguez out of jail after 18 days

updated 2:25 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Former “Lost” star Michelle Rodriguez has found her way out of jail.

Rodriguez was released from a Los Angeles County women’s jail in Lynwood on Wednesday after serving 18 days of a 180-day sentence for violating probation in a drunken driving case, authorities said.

She was released early under a program that deals with jail overcrowding by allowing nonviolent female inmates to serve as little as 10 percent of their sentence.

The same thing happened two years ago when Rodriguez served just one day of a 60-day jail sentence for probation violation.

As many as 50 women a day are released early, sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said.

“She was treated the same way we do with all females because of the extent of overcrowding,” he said.

Rodriguez was sentenced in October for failing to prove she had done community service and for drinking while wearing an alcohol monitoring device.

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The judge who sentenced Rodriguez ordered that she serve the entire sentence. The judge was consulted about the early release but the Sheriff’s Department had the final say when jail safety was involved, Whitmore said.

“The sheriff supports, obviously, the desire to have inmates serve their full sentence,” but the county has only one women’s jail and it is “bursting at the seams,” Whitmore said.

Rodriguez was on probation after pleading no contest to drunken driving, hit-and-run and driving on a suspended license in connection with two Hollywood incidents in 2003.

While still on probation, she spent five days in a Hawaii jail in 2005 after pleading guilty to drunken driving there, which led to her one-day jail term in Los Angeles for probation violation.

Rodriguez appeared in one season of ABC’s “Lost.” Her film credits include “The Fast and The Furious,” “Blue Crush” and “Girlfight.”

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