LOCKPORT — Niagara County Sheriff James R. Voutour told the County Legislature on Monday that a videoconferencing system has been installed at the County Jail for inmates to confer with probation officers and public defenders.

Voutour said six cameras were installed by a private company at no expense to the county. Report by Buffalo News.

He said that eventually state parole officers may use the system to confer with inmates, and perhaps private attorneys also may do so, although he said they would be charged a fee.

Voutour noted that a videoconferencing system installed several years ago in the County Courthouse was a flop, because state law allows defendants to veto the use of cameras for what would normally be courtroom appearances.

The new system “is more of a benefit to other county departments,” Voutour said.

The proposed 2012 county budget cuts four vacant uniformed officer positions and lays off one civilian computer worker.

One of the reductions was a Drug Task Force investigator, who was demoted to deputy to fill a vacant patrol slot.

Voutour urged the Legislature to restore the drug position, which he said would cost the county $75,000, including benefits.

The budget calls for 105 officers, counting patrol deputies and investigators.

When Majority Leader Richard E. Updegrove asked if it was possible to cut the 129-officer jail staff, Voutour said no.

“We do not want the Department of Corrections to do a staffing study on our jail,” Voutour said.

“We’re probably 15 to 20 [officers] short. I try to keep [state Commissioner of Corrections Thomas A.] Beilein away from me. We’re probably leaner than any other jail in the state our size.”

The jail has a prisoner capacity of 499; Monday’s population was 430, Voutour said.

Voutour also has done away with “safe child” identification cards and child car seat installations at various events to save money.

Training for the SWAT and dive teams has been cut 50 percent, and the county’s payment to Mercy Flight was cut almost in half, saving $13,325.

In response to a question from Minority Leader Dennis F. Virtuoso, D-Niagara Falls, Voutour said the county’s dispatching costs will rise if North Tonawanda transfers its police dispatching to the Sheriff’s Office. He wasn’t sure if there would be counteracting revenue.

A meeting on the switchover is set for next week between Voutour and city officials, but the sheriff said there might be some urgency on the city’s side.

“Their phones failed [Monday] in North Tonawanda. They’re working with a cellphone,” Voutour said.

Tammy New York, Technology, Video Use

The closure of some state prison facilities is still creating controversy as the New York Department of Corrections commissioner says it’s necessary.  Report from Capital News 9.

NYS Department of Corrections Commissioner Brian Fischer said, “We’re not doing this because we want to; we’re doing this because we’re facing a budget crisis … We have permission to close three camps, and on my authority close seven annexes. And that’s part of the 09-10 budget.”

The closures include Camp Mount McGregor in Saratoga County, Camp Gabriels in Franklin County, and Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County, as well as seven annexes around the state, which Fischer said will save taxpayer money. “The savings is considerable,” he said. “We’re talking maybe $20 million this year, and far more the next year.” Fischer said, “Why I’m phasing this in is the fact I’m losing 80 correction’s officers a month through normal attrition. So for, now until, say, October when I close the annexes, we’re going to see a lot of attrition.”

But the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association said the closures simply don’t make sense, that the state can’t handle fewer facilities, and argues savings should come from streamlining the whole system. NYSCOPBA said the closures may force workers to move to keep their job, even after a two-percent reduction in the workforce last year.

vericatrajkova Economic Issues, New York, Personnel Issues

When officers walk the expanded Rensselaer County NY Jail next year thry may have a heavy ring of keys jingling on their hip and a PDA in their hand. The old ways of corrections will meet high-tech reality in the $37 million expansion that will add 192 cells, giving the county room for 435 inmates in the South Troy correctional facility.  Reported by the Troy Times Union.

Inmates will wear bracelets with bar codes and be watched by nearly 450 surveillance cameras. A correction officer or Sheriff Jack Mahar will be able to zoom in with a PDA to locate an inmate and see what he’s doing at any moment.  “It will be really different. We put a lot of thought into this,” said Mahar, known in the county for appreciating the savings technology can bring.

The jail will be the first in the region with personal digital assistants, Mahar said Wednesday during a tour of the new construction. Besides carrying the PDAs, officers also will gain access to locked areas using swipe cards and biometrics that will read either their fingerprints or conduct a retinal scan. They’ll still need big jail keys to open some locked doors.

Inmates processed through the new booking area also will sit in a high-tech scanning chair that will detect if they have any hidden metal objects. Inmates are expected to be quieter, too. Plans call for giving each prisoner wireless headsets to listen to televisions playing in the cell blocks …

The new jail wing, with its four pods of 48 cells each, is expected to open in December or January. Most of the construction work will be completed in the late fall.  Besides the high-tech monitoring systems, the jail will have expanded kitchen facilities, a larger visiting area, expanded locker rooms for correction officers and more classroom space. Even the department’s canine teams will get space for kennels.

vericatrajkova NY Rensselaer County, New York, Prison and Jail Construction

There are not many winners in the new New York State budget, but the fiscal plan will make it easier for some prison inmates to be released early for medical, merit and other factors.  This report from the Buffalo News.

The relaxed standards, contained deep within the 2009 state budget, go beyond the much-publicized reforms to the Rockefeller-era drug laws that Gov. David A. Paterson and lawmakers pushed to include in the fiscal plan over the objections of many district attorneys.  The provisions will, according to supporters, encourage more humane treatment of a select number of inmates while, in some cases, making prisons safer. The efforts will also save money and, eventually, help in the years ahead to close expensive facilities that are seeing fewer inmates.

But critics insist that some of  the new standards are open to wide interpretation that will result in the release of still-dangerous inmates.  “It’s a wholesale change in the policies that have led to the most significant drop in the violent crime rate of any state in the nation,” said State Sen. Michael F. Nozzolio, a Finger Lakes Republican who until January had served for years as chairman of the Senate’s Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee. “These issues, taken together, will ensure more violent criminals are out on the streets, and that’s going to create tremendous pressur e for law enforcement. It will make our cities less safe,” Nozzolio said.

The major sentencing change involves the Rockefeller drug laws, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for some drug violations and providing judges with more discretion to steer some individuals to treatment instead of prison … The new budget adopted last week [also] permits some inmates to be released on medical parole if approved by a physician and the state Parole Board, a plan originally proposed by Paterson in December. It is the first major change to medical parole laws since 1992, when terminally ill inmates were first allowed to leave prison early. It also recognizes the prison system’s increasingly aging population; the number of inmates older than 55 has risen from 1,500 to more than 3,600 in the last decade … The Paterson administration estimates that 45 individuals now in prison could be released this year. They estimate $2 million in savings this year from the early releases …

The new budget also includes an expansion of the merit-time program that permits early release of eligible inmates, including violent felons. It allows the release of such inmates six months before the completion of their minimum sentence. Not eligible are those convicted of first-degree murder or sex crimes.   The new merit-time effort takes into consideration whether an inmate participated in no less than two years of college programming while in prison and other efforts to reduce recidivism rates, such as enrollment in a state-approved apprenticeship program. Credit can also be given for working as an inmate hospice aide. The inmate’s prison behavior, and even whether they filed a “frivolous” civil lawsuit while in prison, are also considered as factors for the credit.

There is a great deal more detail and background in the Buffalo News article.

vericatrajkova Drug Treatment & Diversion, Early Release, Economic Issues, New York, Sentencing

Under a deal struck between New York Governor David Paterson and Democratic legislators, three NY DOC camps will be closed.  Report from the Albany Times-Union.

Camp McGregor, a minimum-security state prison in Saratoga County, is on a list of three prisons that would close under the new budget. The camp that currently has 59 inmates is part of the Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility complex. Other parts of the complex will remain open.

Two other prison camps, Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County and Camp Gabriel in Franklin County, under the deal. Paterson proposed closing four prisons in his executive budget but one, Camp Georgetown in Madison County, was spared in the final budget package. The state will save $22 million by closing the three prisons and consolidating other facilities in the Department of Correctional Sevices, according to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

vericatrajkova Economic Issues, INTERNATIONAL, New York

The Washington Post has reported on the fight of one area to fight NY Department of Corrections plan to close prisons and camps.

On most mornings [in Norwich NY], for about as long as anyone can remember, a green minibus arrives from the outskirts of town and discharges a crew of young men in look-alike gear: green pants and green or red sweat shirts. They rake leaves in the fall and shovel snow in the winter. They paint buildings and clean up debris. They helped put a roof on the county courthouse … The work crews are inmates from the nearby Camp Pharsalia, a minimum-security state prison tucked into a hillside a dozen miles outside town. For the city of Norwich, like other rural Upstate New York communities, the 110-inmate Pharsalia and other prison camps have become something of an economic lifeline, for decades providing not just manpower, but also jobs, in a region where work is hard to come by …

New York is facing a $13 billion deficit, and a falling inmate population, and Gov. David A Paterson (D) has proposed saving about $26 million by shuttering four of the state’s prison facilities, including Camp Pharsalia and nearby Camp Georgetown. Faced with the prospect of losing a big part of their economic base, these small, distressed towns and cities are banding together with a common cry: “Save Our Prison!”…

[M]any struggling, mostly rural, communities came to see prisons as a substitute for the family farms and the small manufacturing plants that were vanishing. “Prison growth was a lot about economic development,” said Tracy Huling, who produced a documentary about the phenomenon, titled “Yes, In My Backyard”.  “It started in the ’80s, when the farm crisis exploded across rural America,” she said. “Agribusiness drove out family farms, and the economic base of a lot of rural communities just collapsed. In the absence of a real recovery strategy to address that, you have a lot of prisons” …

Norwich Mayor Joseph P. Maiurano has calculated the cost, for his city, and for surrounding Chenango County, one of New York’s poorest: Fifty-nine corrections officers, and their family members, may have to leave the area for jobs in other facilities. About 40 local businesses will lose procurement funds. More than 50 local organizations benefit from the work the inmates provide.  The prison is a major employer, but it also has a direct impact on other services, such as postal services. The local post office is largely supported by the huge volume of inmate mail. With the loss of the prison, residents fear the post office could close, too …

The Pharsalia inmates — the vast majority of them from New York City — perform a variety of duties, including maintaining horse and ski trails, working in the public parks and thinning the forests. Maiurano estimated that for the city alone, he would need to hire four additional workers to make up for the loss of the free inmate labor. “Where are we going to get another $100,000-plus dollars?” Maiurano asked in an interview in his office. “We don’t have the income — the growth isn’t here.”

vericatrajkova County-State Issues, Economic Issues, NY Chenango County, New York

Sullivan County NY’s new jail could cost almost $74 million, according to the latest estimate, termed “soft”, by an architect working on the project, and the county sheriff.  That was clearly not what Sullivan lawmakers wanted to hear, according to the Mid-Hudson News Network.

What that $73.8 million estimate would buy for the county is a 256-bed jail that could hold up to 304 inmates, if the county used a permitted option to double-bed 25 percent of the cells.  Additional ‘pods’, each with a capacity of about 50 inmates, could be added, for an estimated $5.2 million each.  Pods could be added in the future if more capacity is needed …

While the first estimate on a jail, a year ago, was well over $100 million, and the project has been downsized while still compliant with state mandates, the new figure is not sitting well with county officials.   “Shocked” was the reaction of Republican legislator David Sager, who said he was “dismayed” that the cost didn’t go down a bit more.  “None of us are happy with that”, claimed County Treasurer Ira Cohen, who said he had serious concerns about “affordability and future debt management.”

Kukuvka said they are looking at every way possible to trim costs further, even going so far as subdividing pods to accommodate different classes of inmates in a single pod.   The tentative timeline is to be able to go to bid, perhaps by November of this year, break ground in early 2010, and open the jail in 2012.

vericatrajkova NY Sullivan County, New York, Prison and Jail Construction

A Brooklyn judge has cleared the way for the city to resume sending inmates to the Brooklyn House of Detention, which stopped housing them overnight in 2003, but has ruled that the city’s effort to nearly double the size of the jail required environmental and land-use reviews.  Story from the New York Times.

“The court’s decision clears the way for the city to continue to use the Brooklyn Detention Center as a jail for Brooklyn, just as it has since 1957,” Correction Commissioner Martin F. Horn said in a statement. “We will continue to maintain the jail in a condition for occupancy at its capacity” … The judge rejected the argument by community groups and the city comptroller that reopening the jail, which has 759 beds, required additional reviews. But she ruled that the city may not proceed on expanding the jail without such reviews. Plans call for a 720-bed expansion.

vericatrajkova NY New York City, Prison and Jail Construction

In answer to criticism of State treatment for addicts in New York’s prison system, Commissioner Brian Fischer wrote the following letter to the New York Times:

The myth that addiction goes untreated in prison is just that: a myth.   Last year 90 percent of all inmates with identified substance abuse needs who were released for the first time had received addiction treatment in New York’s state prisons.  Every day nearly 10,000 inmates receive in-prison substance abuse treatment from qualified, professional staff members. Last year alone, 34,300 inmates participated.

We offer traditional treatment programs, as well as specialized treatment for sex offenders and mentally ill inmates. We offer intensive, minimum-six-month structured residential treatment. More than two-thirds of inmates who complete the program stay out of prison for at least two years. Diversion to community-based treatment, as Gov. David A. Paterson supports, is an appropriate response to the issue of addiction. But treatment within prison remains vital for those who are nonetheless incarcerated.

vericatrajkova Drug Treatment & Diversion, New York

The economic crisis is hitting local jails throughout the country.  Just this weekend I found the following examples:

Ramsey County MN Corrections has been told to cut $550,000 from this year’s budget.

Community Corrections, which runs the jail, is being asked to trim $536,000. Department spokesman Chris Crutchfield said it’s unclear where those might slice.   “We have a hole to fill, and it’s a question of how we’re going to keep people safe with $500,000 less, and that’s a lot of money for us,” he said.

Orange County CA has cancelled an expansion:

A jail unit that houses nearly 200 inmates and was planned for expansion earlier this year will be closed because of budget constraints. Orange County sheriff’s officials on Friday began shutting down the unit at James Musick jail. The low-security inmates housed in tents, which were erected in the 1980s to ease overcrowding, will be moved to other areas of the jail as well as other facilities in the county system. The move is expected to save about $1.2 million a year.

Nassau County NY has cut visiting hours:

As part of a countywide initiative to close a $130-million gap in this year’s budget, the jail no longer has visiting hours on Saturday starting this weekend, Chief Deputy County Executive Marilyn Gottlieb said last week.   The change surprised some who stopped by the jail yesterday afternoon expecting to visit someone.

vericatrajkova CA Orange County, California, Economic Issues, MN Ramsey County, Minnesota, NY Nassau County, New York, Prison and Jail Construction, Visits