Tammy Prison and Jail Construction, Virginia

The Virginia Northwestern Regional Jail Authority will cut costs this year by keeping more than 100 beds — an entire housing pod — empty.  Report from the Winchester Star.

“It’s saving us money in man-hours and utilities … around a half-million dollars,” Northwestern Regional Adult Detention Center Superintendent Bruce Conover said Thursday after the authority adopted its $17,299,092 budget for fiscal year 2010. The budget, which takes effect July 1, is $1,573,984 lower than the current budget of $18,878,477.

The jail’s tighter budget is a ripple effect spreading from local governments’ efforts to cut spending.  The detention center is funded mainly by contributions from Winchester and Frederick, Clarke, and Fauquier counties.   For the next fiscal year, all of those localities are reducing their contributions … Along with closing the pod, the jail authority is cutting costs by eliminating 12 positions it expects will become vacant this year through attrition, and by cutting weekend meals for prisoners to just brunch and dinner …  The detention center is built to hold up to 824 prisoners. It has 533 now, and has housed an average of 510 to 530 inmates per day for several months.

Conover said Thursday that closing the pod will save the jail money that would have been used to feed, clothe, and guard inmates who would have been housed there.  However, while housing inmates in the now-vacant pod cost money, it also generated revenue … According to Conover, the pod last year housed around 100 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisoners who have since been transferred to a larger facility, and around 40 prisoners from Prince William County who stayed at the detention center while the Manassas jail was expanded.  Conover said the detention center collected $717,000 in revenue from housing those prisoners.

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The expansion of Gloucester County VA Jail, a project deemed necessary 17 months ago, is not dead.  It is, however, on life support, as reported by the Daily Press.

County supervisors agreed this week to include the project, among three dozen others, on a wish list to receive funding from the $787 billion federal stimulus package.   Translation: The county will expand the jail only if someone else picks up the tab. Sensing the unlikelihood of that, Supervisor Louise Theberge said on Friday: “There’s no jail being built” …

Her comment is a stark contrast from May 2006, when supervisors agreed to spend $10.8 million to build an addition that would increase inmate capacity from 42 to 108. At the time, the jail was so crowded that inmates had to sleep in the recreation yard during the summer.

Sheriff Steve Gentry… quelled the issue by using a combination of alternative incarceration programs to keep the inmate population stable.  In 2008, his first year in office, the jail averaged 84 inmates. The 2007 average was 83 inmates. The figures belie a 2004 study in which consultants predicted the jail would average 136 inmates.  Gentry bucked the prediction, in part, by expanding the jail’s work-release and electronic-monitoring programs.

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The new Western Virginia Regional Jail in Roanoke is now in business.

“Some of my inmates have been hearing about it and they’re ready to go,” Montgomery County Sheriff Tommy Whitt said last week. He and his staff will be happy to see them off, too.   And the reason is no mystery.   Whitt’s jail is packed to the bursting point — just like those serving Roanoke and Franklin counties and Salem, who all cooperated to build the new regional facility. The local jails will remain open to house inmates awaiting sentencing, community service inmates and weekenders. But over the next few weeks, while the final touches are put on the new jail, they’ll be shipping off a total of about 550 inmates to the regional facility.

Inmates — male or female — who have been sleeping on the floor will have a bunk. It will be a metal panel covered by a plastic-coated mattress, but it will be an improvement … They’ll get a taste of the sun, even if they’re not directly in its glow, through the huge overhead skylights.  And they won’t have someone bumping into them or stepping over them just to get from one side of the room to another …

The facility is a maze of 1,100 doors and locks, all computer controlled, and almost every square inch of space is visible to jail officers either directly or through one of 186 cameras. There will be few trips outside the jail. An in-house medical complex will be able to handle everything from colds to stitches, X-rays to isolation, dentistry to dialysis.   Visitation with family and friends will be via video-conferencing — no more face-to-face through three-quarter-inch bulletproof glass …

Reducing overcrowding also is “a matter of stability for the facility,” Whitt said. His jail, originally rated for 60 inmates, now has an average daily population between 174 and 180. An additional 30 to 40 are housed in other jails.   His staff is so overburdened “it’s hard to run programs, hard to get to the library, hard to get to recreation, hard going back and forth for medical care. They’re always moving people through people or over people to get anything done.  “It’s not a good environment” …

[T]he new jail is designed so that it can operate with a smaller staff than traditionally designed lock-ups. Holt, who is also chairman of the authority that operates the regional jail, said a substantial savings in operating costs — as much as $30 million — is expected over the 30-year term of the bonds sold to finance it.

There is a great deal more information in the Roanoke Times.

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The New York Times‘ Green Inc blog recently published an interesting survey of environmental projects within the corrections’ industry.  A sample:

Instead of reporting to the laundry or the kitchen or the boiler room, a Washington state prison inmate may report to the compost heap [if they are] taking part in a “green work” program at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center. Inmates grow organic produce, compost the prison’s food waste, take part in ecological research projects with a nearby university, and even produce honey from the prison’s own hives.  The Washington State Department of Corrections boasts 34 LEED-certified facilities, with 923,789 square feet of LEED-certified space added in fiscal year 2008 alone …

This fall, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced 16 new green retrofitting projects, which they estimate will save $3 million in energy costs each year. The state already has solar power fields at two facilities, and plans to build six more in the coming year. A new $176 million juvenile detention facility in Alameda County — home to Berkeley and Oakland — recently became the country’s first jail to receive LEED gold certification.  Other green projects — from wind turbines to biomass boilers — have been announced by Departments of Corrections in Virginia, Nevada, and Indiana…

Ken Ricci, of Ricci Greene Associates, is currently working on a new $120 million detention center in downtown Denver, which the company plans to submit for LEED certification. “There’s a recognition that sustainable, or ‘green’ design, is actually a plus for a population that’s confined 24 hours a day,” Mr. Ricci said. “Environment cues behavior. If you treat people like animals, they behave like animals.”  Mr. Ricci … says design elements that earn LEED points, like daylighting and access to views, also improve security. “If you treat them like human beings — that is to say, there’s daylight coming in, the noise level is at a normative level — therefore your adrenaline level goes down, therefore your stress level goes down, the inmates feel safer.”

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When the Western Virginia Regional Jail near Dixie Caverns opens Friday, local officials will be breathing a sigh of relief.   Not only will the regional facility relieve overcrowding in the Franklin County jail, it will mean less man hours spent by deputies transporting prisoners, said Franklin County Sheriff Ewell Hunt.   Report from the Franklin News-Post.

“During the months of December and January, we logged 15,340 miles transporting inmates to other facilities,” Hunt said. “This consumed 613 man-hours, or the equivalent of two people, full time, doing nothing but transports.”   Hunt said the largest population of prisoners are now held at the Middle River Regional Jail in Staunton, which is a 220-mile round trip, a journey that was made by county deputies 37 times in December and January.  “Our current situation is tenuous,” said Rick Huff, county administrator, “because, beyond our own facility, we are operating on a space-available basis with jails as far as two hours (drive) away. The regional jail was our most cost-effective alternative to assuring that we will have a place to hold the inmates we are legally responsible for.”

Franklin County decided to join Montgomery and Roanoke counties and the City of Salem to build the regional jail about four years ago. The joint effort was chosen because the state has a policy of reimbursing 50 percent of capital costs for regional facilities. That means the three counties and one city will share in paying about $46.8 million of the $93.6 million total cost of the facility.

Franklin County’s jail was built in 1937 and certified to hold 49 prisoners. The county is currently responsible for about 200 inmates in 12 different facilities around the state and has no guarantee that those facilities will have beds available if the county needs them … The county plans to keep its existing jail open to house about 60 pretrial and workforce prisoners.

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Virginia House and Senate budget negotiators reached a tentative midnight agreement Friday on amendments to the state’s cash-starved $77 billion budget.  Report from MSNBC includes details of interest to the DOC.

The compromise fully restores the state’s share of funding to sheriffs, local police departments and other officeholders the Virginia Constitution requires each city or county to have. It retains funding for half of the state’s two-dozen drug treatment courts and designates $2 million for Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. It also scraps Governor Kaine’s plan to release prisoners early and divert some offenders to electronic monitoring instead of jail time.

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A plan to build a $100 million regional jail for Brunswick, Dinwiddie and Mecklenburg counties in Virginia would alleviate the need for inmate space in all three localities dealing with overcrowded and inadequate local jails, local officials said.

The regional jail, which has been in the planning stages for nearly four years and was originally estimated to cost $150.2 million, will help the counties save money and will make the jail system more efficient in all three jurisdictions.  The project had not been included in the governor’s 2009-10 budget proposal, but this month legislators in both houses approved amendments to include the project in their respective budget bills, making it more likely that it will move forward in the next few years. A state funding match, however, may not be available until 2013.

The Meherrin River Regional Jail Authority, formed in early 2008, initially wanted to build an 800-bed jail but has scaled back its plans to 408 beds.  The current plan consists of building a main facility in Brunswick County, near Alberta, that will accommodate the pretrial and sentenced prisoners from Brunswick and Dinwiddie as well as the sentenced prisoners from Mecklenburg. A smaller satellite jail near the government offices in Mecklenburg will accommodate the pretrial and work-release populations from Mecklenburg … The facilities would be built with a capacity for expansion, and one superintendent would oversee both locations. Once the replacement facilities are built, the local jails will be closed, officials said.

The article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch is long and detailed, covering the history and the financing of the project.

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The Northwestern Virginia Regional Jail faces cuts in next year’s budget due to less money from the state and a loss of federal inmates.  Superintendent Bruce Conover said that “This budget is austere,” according to NVReport.

The proposed $17.2 million fiscal 2010 budget assumes the jail will receive approximately $1.5 million less in revenue than it saw in the current year, including a gap of $717,000 due to a lack of inmates from outside agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Prince William County. Another $506,000 shortfall is due to a 7 percent reduction in state per diem and salary assistance, and another $270,000 is from the implementation of an aid-to-locality reduction for 2010 …

Inmate population has an impact on the jail in both its expenses and revenue. According to Conover, the jail population has stayed around 525 for months.  “We all kind of anticipated that when the economy had gone bad that we’d see an increase in the inmate population,” Conover said. “It hadn’t happened yet.”  The jail saw its average daily population rise to 598 in fiscal 2007 and 623 in 2008. The facility returned a number of inmates to Prince William County’s jail when its facility completed an expansion …

The draft budget includes an overall 9.1 percent reduction in spending and seeks to cut operating expenses by 11 percent. The assistant superintendent position remains frozen and unfilled; a nurse and two administrative positions also will not be funded through attrition. Conover said the jail anticipates a reduction of 12 positions in the next year.

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The Adam Walsh Act was an instant controversy.  But all the debate between advocates and attorneys over whether the Walsh Act is legal or logical now seems for naught. In this economy, the real question is not whether the Walsh Act is constitutional, but whether it’s too expensive. By many calculations, it is.

Sex offender management boards in California and Colorado have recommended their states reject the Adam Walsh Act — which changes the way states track and monitor sex offenders — in part because of the crippling cost. Other states, including Florida, Iowa, Virginia and Texas, are also doing the math and finding that the federal standard seems more expensive to adopt than to ignore, no matter the penalty.   And there are penalties. States have until July 27 to become compliant with Walsh sex offender regulations or risk losing federal finding.

In Nevada, [for example] meeting the deadline could safeguard hundreds of thousands of dollars. But carrying out the provisions of the Walsh Act could cost millions … Nevada is crunching the numbers. So with the deadline for compliance looming, no one knows whether Nevada going to spend millions to save thousands. Part of the reason Nevada doesn’t know how much Walsh will cost may lie in the state’s speedy adoption of the federal act. Nevada is one of eight states that passed Walsh regulations after Congress approved them in 2006. The vast remainder of states instead chose to evaluate the Walsh Act, considering its constitutionality first and then its cost. Concerns now coming to light in these states were barely discussed in Nevada. Instead, issues with Walsh are being worked out in Nevada courts as a result of those lawsuits levied against the act …

To understand what kind of money Nevada might end up spending — if the law weathers court challenges — we can only look to the calculations of other states. In California, the Sex Offender Management Board came up with an initial assessment of $38 million. Missing the deadline, by comparison, would cost $210,000 … California, though, has a much higher population of sex offenders than Nevada. So perhaps a more apt comparison for Nevada is Virginia, where officials figured it would cost $12.4 million to carry out the Walsh regulations, or $400,000 not to. Or consider Florida: about $3.2 million for Walsh, versus a $2.1 million to $2.8 million penalty for missing the deadline, if not rejecting the sex offender legislation outright. Each state used its own formula, and each came up with the same answer: It would cost more to adopt than to ignore … Not a single state — including the eight that adopted Walsh regulations — has been deemed “compliant” with the law. And noncompliance means a reduction in funding once the deadline passes …

Walsh could be complicated and costly enough to prompt politicians in the states where the act has not yet been voted on to simply decide they aren’t interested. And if this happens, the entire purpose of the Walsh Act, which was to create a national, unified system for dealing with sex offenders in every state, could be undermined — leaving Nevada, as an early adopter, with its hands tied.

The article in the Las Vegas Sun contains a long and detailed look at these important arguments.

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