IN County Inmate Population Leveling Off
The number of inmates held at the Marion County Jail is leveling off after a surge in average daily population last year, county officials said.The increase, in which the number of inmates climbed past 2,600 a day for two months last year, does not signal a return to the county’s chronic problem of jail crowding, county officials said. News and ADP chart from the IndyStar.
They say that the number of inmates dropped sharply at the beginning of this year and that county judges — whose decisions are critical to keeping jail numbers in check — are doing a better job of limiting how long inmates stay in jail.
“I’m not overly concerned that we’re reaching any problems with overcrowding currently,” Superior Court Judge Steven Eichholtz said. “Our recent numbers have been really pretty good.”
The increase came during a period when the Bureau of Justice Statistics studied jail populations nationwide. The study released last week found that the number of inmates held dropped 2.3 percent from 2008 to 2009 — the first decrease since the agency began compiling the jail data in 1982.
But in Marion County, the study found the inmate population jumped 9 percent in 2009. The county’s four pretrial holding facilities — Marion County Jail, Marion County Jail II, the former lockup in the City-County Building and Liberty Hall — held 2,336 inmates on June 30, 2008, but 2,541 inmates on June 30, 2009, according to the study.
Kevin Murray, the lawyer for Sheriff Frank Anderson, said the increase was part of the growing pains associated with a crop of rookie judges.
Marion County elected six new judges to the bench in 2008. Eight sitting judges moved to different courtrooms when those new judges donned their robes in January 2009.
The county’s criminal court judges are key to controlling jail population because they decide who gets locked up and for how long.
“Whenever there’s a transition and you have a lot of new judges coming in, there’s going to be a learning curve,” Murray said. “By the fall, things had settled down.”
The average daily jail population peaked at 2,622 in March 2009 but remained below 2,300 from December through April, according to figures supplied by the Sheriff’s Department. The average daily population for May — the last month for which complete figures are available — was 2,382.
Despite last year’s increase in jail population, The American Civil Liberties Union of Indianapolis, whose 1972 lawsuit brought the jail under federal oversight for 35 years, doesn’t believe crowding has re-emerged as a concern.”We’re not really getting any complaints from Marion County,” said Ken Falk, legal director for the ACLU in Indianapolis.
Jail crowding is a politically touchy subject for Marion County, which remained under federal court order to improve jail conditions until U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker closed the case in 2007. For decades, county leaders struggled with how to limit jail population while inmates slept on plastic cots and judges fretted over whether to free inmates who might go on to commit violent crimes.
The county has since built the Arrestee Processing Center, which was designed to eliminate long stays for those accused of minor offenses. The center has a court that operates on nights and weekends, which gives the newly arrested a chance to post bond.
The court also implemented a new bond matrix, which looks at a person’s criminal history, employment and family ties and gives judges a yardstick to help them decide how high they should set a defendant’s bond.
Judge Eichholtz said the county has not returned to the crowded conditions that led to the civil rights complaints in the federal lawsuit.
“We’ve reviewed our bond matrix to make sure people are not being held on high bonds for minor offenses,” Eichholtz said. “The jail numbers have been pretty consistent, but length of stay has gone down consistently for all courts. That means we’re holding more people, but for fewer days.”
Eichholtz likened jail management to monitoring tables at a restaurant or rooms in a hotel.
“It’s all about turnover,” he said. “You always have to be careful, making sure you are evaluating, holding the right people and releasing the right people.”
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