PA County Jail’s ADP Lowest In Decade
Until the current drop in the local inmate population, overcrowding had routinely burdened the Erie County PA Prison since it opened in 1995. Reported by the Erie Times-News.
It had so many inmates in 1998 that it sent some to empty cells in other Pennsylvania counties. In early 2003, the prison added second bunks to hundreds of cells. “We’re reaching our capacity,” then-Warden Charles Barber said in April 2003. He spoke just after the prison’s total average daily population surpassed 700 inmates for the first time. The number peaked Oct. 30, 2006, at 743. The figures have gone the other way since then. The prison’s average daily population in December 2008 was 531, the lowest since 2001. The daily census was 516 on Dec. 24, 2008, also the lowest daily figure since 2001, and the average daily population was 606 for all of 2008, another recent low …
Erie County Judge Ernest J. DiSantis Jr., who works closely with the prison as head of the local court’s Trial Division, said public safety remains a major factor at sentencing. But he said his fellow judges know that home electronic monitoring and other programs for nonviolent inmates are effective. “Everyone is conscious of the issue of prison overcrowding,” DiSantis said. “We try to use incarceration judiciously” …
DiSantis is confident the shift is due to one change in policy, regarding the incarceration of parents who fail to pay child support. He said a change in policy for jailing offenders on probation and parole has likely contributed to the shift as well. A February 2005 state Superior Court decision … said judges must consider a delinquent parent’s ability to pay. The Erie County Prison held 124 inmates on average a day for failure to pay child support in 2005. The number dropped to 52 in 2008 …
In the other policy shift, for offenders on parole or probation, Erie County’s judges in 2007 altered a 2002 program. The old program, a zero-tolerance initiative called Sanction Certainty, required probation officers, with few exceptions, to jail offenders who committed probation or parole violations, such as drinking alcohol. The new program takes a more gradual approach. An offender is likely to receive a verbal or written warning before prison. “We’re not necessarily looking to lock them up the first time around,” DiSantis said.
Community Corrections, Electronic Monitoring, Overcrowding, PA Erie County, Pennsylvania