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Eternal problem of jail overcrowding....
by Aaron E. Looney
http://www.ascensioncitizen.com/articles/2005/11/16/news/news1.txt
Representatives from a Kansas City, Mo. consulting firm told the Ascension Parish
Council's Finance Committee Thursday night that the issue of overcrowding and cost at
the Parish Jail near Donaldsonville can be solved through changes in local resource
involvement and offender monitoring.
Part of a lengthy agenda during the meeting at the Parish DPW office, Justice
Concepts, Inc. representatives Nancy Insco and Allen Beck gave a PowerPoint
presentation which outlined their recent study and report on the jail facility and
what could be done to ease the overcrowding issues there, including possible
expansion of inmate housing.
Insco, who has served as a warden in numerous facilities before entering the private
sector, said Sheriff Jeff Wiley and Warden Bobby Webre contacted her company in the
spring of 2004 asking for a study to see how the Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office,
as well as parish government, could stop the influx of prisoners into the jail.
Justice Concepts then went to the jail in October of 2004 and began a five-day,
on-site study of the jail's workings. The report was concluded in March 2005 and sent
back to the parish for review.
“We collected an enormous amount of data from the jail,” Insco said. “In fact, we
began collecting information before we arrived.”
Insco said her company also looked at the parish community as a whole in regards to
criminal activity levels.
Insco praised Wiley and the staff at the jail for their work ethic and their efforts
to utilize what was available to them, but added that
“There was a real sense of respect for the plight of the offenders and what it was
going to take to manage them in a very professional way,” Insco said of the jail
staff.
Beck said the bottom line of the study was simple - “Pay no more than you need to.”
However, he said that does not mean that the quality of the jail needs to suffer.
“We're not saying that you ignore the safety of the community,” Beck said. “Criminal
justice is probably you're largest financial outlay. It eats a lot of parish budgets.
Our experience is that there are ways to hold down costs and reduce the impact.”
Beck laid out four basic ways that the Sheriff's Office could hold down costs of
housing inmates: ensuring pre-trial defendants remain crime-free and show up for
trial, appropriate sanctions for those who are sentenced, reducing recivitism and
holding down costs.
“Common thinking about alleviating jail overcrowding is automatically to build more
beds,” Beck said. “Architects do a lot of marketing. What they market is building
more beds.
“The message here is not just bringing in a few more cells.”
According to the study, nearly all areas of the jail compound need to be expanded
because of current inadequacies or because they will be inadequate in the future.
These include booking and medical facilities and inmate spaces.
“The booking room you have there is just about the size of some people's walk-in
closets,” Beck said.
There are 230 local inmates in the jail, Insco said, with 22 female prisoners being
housed in St. Charles Parish at a cost of $22 a day to the parish. Also, 87 percent
of inmates are untried detainees and 84 percent of the total population of the jail
have been in jail before on other charges.
“Some may stay for a few hours, while some are in for a few days,” Insco said.
“Usually, this fuels the argument in the community that because of the overcrowding
in the jail, those individuals are not punished adequately.”
Beck said that the parish is paying $90,000 annually to house the female prisoners in
St. Charles Parish.
Insco pointed out that not having a supervised pre-trial release program, a lack of
supervision for locally sentenced offenders, allowing unsentenced inmates to stay too
long and possessing insufficient correctional programs can lead to a jail
overcrowding.
“We do have several pre-trial defendants in this jail who have exceeded the
reasonable allotment of time in jail,” Insco said.
Insco said that when there are not community programs for defendants, the rate of
recivitism is higher. She also said that many people would rather stay in jail
because their life would be more difficult under structured supervision.
“Many times, these inmates would rather commit an infraction so they could not be
released or not eligible for parole,” Insco said. “They knew that the parole order
they'd receive was likely going to have a number of conditions of supervisions, and
those are difficult. Many times, they'd rather lie around in the prison. We call that
the ‘three hots and a cot' syndrome.'”
“There's no constitutional right to watch ‘As the World Turns,'” Beck said. “We need
to have tough thinking about dealing with people in the criminal justice system.
Sitting in jail, taking up a jail bed and taking up our expenses is not a tough way.”
Insco and Beck presented five suggestions that would help with the problems. Some,
including the creation of a Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee, are already in
place and others, such as using local resources to expand supervision, are still
pending.
Using these methods, Beck said the parish may be able to stave off expanding the jail
anywhere from one to five years. However, he said that expansion will eventually be a
necessity.
The Ascension Parish Jail is one of only six sheriff's offices in the state to
receive national accreditation, Wiley said.
“It couldn't be run better policy-wise or facility-wise,” Wiley said.
The sheriff noted that he has not come before the board about this problem because he
recognized “the problems we all have here in the parish” and felt that the public
“did not want to extend their hard-earned tax dollars for a jail.”
Wiley said that meetings of the parish's Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee have
been very positive and that some changes are in the works.
Wiley also said that in the case of neighboring Livingston Parish, Sheriff Willie
Graves is also dealing with an overcrowding problem with his jail facility.
“I don't know that they have dialogued as much as we have,” Wiley said. “The criminal
justice system has many components to it, and it's a flawed system. However, we're
addressing those flaws. Some are constitutional, while others are out of our
control.”
Wiley added that the next step for Ascension Parish is to engage another parish in
housing some of the jail's male prisoners before it is too late.
“If we don't continue to address this, incumbent on me as the sheriff and the keeper
of the jail and you as the owner of the jail, is that we don't position ourselves to
be deliberately indifferent to overcrowding, for fear of a major incident that could
happen in the jail that would, upon reflection in a court of law, show that we were
indifferent,” Wiley said.
Wiley said his office had implemented a pre-trial release program seven years ago.
However, Wiley added that the man in charge of that program, Paul Hall, became
overwhelmed with the amount of cases which came to the program.
“We're not just throwing money at this,” Wiley said. “I will look you in the eye and
tell you that it is inevitable that at some point in the future, we will have to
expand this prison. It will definitely happen. Right now, we're buying time and
trying to culturally change how we view the process.”
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I intend to last long enough to put out of business all *****-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.
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"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
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