Just two years ago, the Pinellas County FL Jail was chronically overcrowded. The facility at times housed 1,000 more inmates than it was designed to hold. Some slept on the floor. However, as the St Petersburg Times reports, things have changed.
But an effort by justice officials to reduce the jail population has worked. In addition, a new medical building opened and an old bus garage nearby was converted into an annex. Now, the jail has hundreds of empty beds. Sheriff Jim Coats hopes to make that pay off — literally. The sheriff will meet with Florida Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil in Tallahassee on Friday to discuss housing state prison inmates in the jail — for a price …
As of Wednesday, the Pinellas jail had 2,942 inmates. In its current configuration it can hold nearly 3,600. But Coats said it was as low as 2,700 just a few months ago. The sheriff said his agency might be able to lease as many as 400 empty beds to the state without incurring extra costs or risk overcrowding at the jail again. But Coats said the jail will only accept minimum security, low-risk prisoners with just a few years left on their sentences …
The jail overcrowding problem was alleviated when Pinellas’ court system began moving cases quicker and getting non-violent offenders out sooner. A new 432-bed medical facility and an old bus garage converted into a 256-bed annex also helped. But even the sheriff had to admit his shock at all this, considering recent overcrowding. Said Coats: “Two years ago at this time I would find it hard to believe that we would be in this situation.”
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Justice should be swift and sure. But in Pinellas County FL, it would be more fitting to call the criminal justice system slow and costly.
Over the course of two decades, the time it takes to close a criminal case in Pinellas has increased dramatically. Example: In 1989, the typical robbery case took 96 days to wrap up in court. Now it’s 244. This costs money. Two-thirds of the inmates at the county jail are not there serving time. They await trial. Each extra day they wait costs about $100 per inmate, according to Pinellas Sheriff’s Office figures. Multiply that cost by 20 years and tens of thousands of extra jail days and it adds up to a financial hit for Pinellas taxpayers totaling tens of millions of dollars …
The county’s disposition rate — the percentage of defendants whose cases are closed in a year divided by the number whose cases are opened — has ranked worse than all of its large county peers and among the slowest statewide. “We weren’t used to being anything other than frankly the most progressive here,” said Pinellas-Pasco Chief Judge Robert Morris. “We were humbled by that.” Bernie McCabe, state attorney for the Pinellas-Pasco circuit, spoke for some in the system when he put the blame on a lack of awareness and “simple procrastination.” He said the system as a whole — prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges — failed to manage their resources as efficiently as they should. “I don’t think you can escape that,” McCabe said …
Now, officials said, they’ve infused day-to-day dealings with a new sense of urgency, cutting days here and there from the amount of time it takes to file charges or turn over discovery. A Violation of Probation court was established. There has been intermittent use of a “rocket docket” to pick off stagnating cases. The courts lowered bond amounts across the board. Said Morris, the chief judge: “We are taking risks with letting people out of jail … that a year ago we would have said, ‘You know the public doesn’t expect us to do this,’ but the message now from the public is, ‘There’s no money’”…
Today, Pinellas judges and prosecutors say they approach each case with a sense of urgency. And they say they’re committed not to let the system get out of whack again. A consultant hired by the county has been studying the problem and is supposed to present a final report this month.
These are extracts from a much longer article at the Tampa Bay Times.
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The Polk County Jail in 2006 housed more people per capita than any jail in Florida, and ranked fifth in the nation among cites or counties with their own jail systems, a new study by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, says.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office sees incarceration as the best way to prevent crime because the offenders and accused offenders housed inside can’t commit crime on the outside, said sheriff’s spokesman Scott Wilder. The population ranking is not something the sheriff’s office considers a problem, Wilder said. He also noted that the office has a number of rehabilitation programs at the jail and plans to open a work camp at the site of the Central County Jail in Bartow that could house up to 100 inmates outside the cells and dorms of the actual jail.
Polk County Commissioner Randy Wilkinson, a longtime critic of incarceration rates in the county, said a jail stay can “cripple” a person financially and make it more difficult to integrate back into society.
Though Polk ranks highest in the state, Florida’s larger counties account for eight of the top 40 incarceration rates in the country, according to the study. The city of Jacksonville, or Duval County, ranks sixth nationally; Pinellas County ranks 10th; Hillsborough is 20th.
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The local newspaper in Pinellas County FL has taken a tour of the jail.
It’s cold, it’s mundane and it’s claustrophobic. It has an inmate population of about 3,600 juveniles, adult men and women who are behind bars and steel doors for everything from disorderly conduct to murder. Between 300 and 600 new inmates are processed daily, creating an overcrowding problem … To ease overcrowding probation officers and the courts are cutting slack on some violators. About 75 percent of the inmates are awaiting trial and two-thirds are under health care …
Inmates sit or sleep behind steel doors or bars in the older section. They are under constant supervision. Prisoner uniforms … red, orange and gray with a red stripe … distinguish inmates by category. Males make up about 73 percent of the prison population. There are roughly 600 females and 50 juveniles, a sharp increase over previous years. “The average stay in the county jail is 49 days,” said Capt. Timothy Downs, who is in charge of corrections operations. But some inmates have been there longer, for years in some cases while awaiting trial. One man who beheaded another has been behind bars for seven years.
Read the full tour here.
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