Why would some Commissioners not want to reduce the jail population? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    In the brief span of about two minutes at the January meeting of the Beaufort County Commission we were subjected to yet another example of what is wrong with the majority's view of their responsibilities as commissioners. The issue was the number of inmates the county is incarcerating who have not been given a speedy trial as mandated by the Constitution.

    Hood Richardson has served as a self-appointed watchdog of the county's judicial system for several months now. At almost every meeting he makes public the problems endemic in the way the system is operated. One of those problems is the impact on the jail population as a result of case management by the District Attorney's Office. The symptom of this poor management is the number of inmates that the county is paying their room and board costs to keep them in the county jail rather than moving the convicts to the state prison system.

    Here's basically how it works. When a person is charged with a crime they are "booked" into the jail. A magistrate can release them immediately on bond or can hold them until a "first appearance" before a judge who then determines whether they qualify of release on bond. Unless and until released they are classified as "pre-trial" inmates. Thus, the bonding practices have a significant impact on the jail population at any given point in time.

    Once tried, if the inmate is convicted they are transferred, typically, to the state correctional system and are no longer a financial liability to the county taxpayers. So the sooner the inmate is tried the less the cost of operating the jail is.

    The most recent "reports" showed that three inmates had been in the county jail for more than a year. Four for more than six months and eleven for more than four months. Had all of these inmates been tried and transferred to the state prison system it would have "saved" Beaufort approximately $900 a day or $27,000 per month. Over time that adds up to a substantial chunk of change.

    Of course it is a complex system, with each case having its own rather particular circumstances. The cases load must be managed if the jail is to operate efficiently.

    The scheduling of trials is a function of the District Attorney's office. But other factors impinge on that scheduling. How many times a case is continued by the judges is one factor. Often the defense attorney's/public defender seek delays for various reasons. The most frequent reason the DA has given for delays in trial is that "the lab results are not back." And the Observer has found cases that appear to have simply "fallen through the cracks" without anyone knowing the prisoner is simply sitting in jail, or at least so it seemed to the inmate.

    Another interesting facet of this issue is the setting of bonds. The theory of bonding is that financial liability will insure the defendant showing up when his case is called in court. In reality the bonding process creates distinct classification of defendants. Those with money/property post bond easily while those who are poor have to pay much more (to get a bail bondsman to 'stand' their bond) and often simply cannot afford to cover even small bonds and thus they stay in jail. Numerous studies have shown that it is not typically the amount of a bond that determines whether a person stays in jail or is released, but rather it is how wealthy they are. More poor people are jailed than are wealthy people. Poor people stay in jail longer than wealthy people do. And the amount of the bond has little to do with those facts. A thousand dollar bond may be impossible for some people to make, even with a bailbondsman willing to stand for the thousand dollars for a substantial commission; while to another person a thousand dollars is no problem at all. One sits in jail, the other walks free.

    The jail is an integral part of the judicial system. How the District Attorney, the magistrates, the judges and the Sheriff use and operate the jail is a major function of government in any county. One has to wonder if the Gang of Four would be willing to spend millions of dollars on new school facilities without knowing whether the school system was operating the existing facilities efficiently or not...oh, now that is an interesting point is it not? Are we having a repeat of the forty million school facilities fiasco in which they wasted twenty million dollars building classrooms in the wrong place? What if the judicial system could operate without spending millions of dollars for a new jail? One would think the Gang of Four would want to know that.

    So there are two major issues: How well is the case load managed and how is the system monitored to determine whether it is working as it should.

    There is no oversight system for monitoring the system. The Beaufort Observer has exhausted enormous resources trying to monitor the system and we have simply been unable to access the data with which to assess the operation of the system. There are no routine reports generated that allow the public to know how efficiently the system is functioning.

    So what Hood is trying to do in the video clip below is get the Board of Commissioners to procure the data and information so the public can know what is going on. His reasoning is that Commissioners have a duty to see that the system functions well enough to insure a fair (speedy) trial. But beyond, as he has often said, the commissioners need to know that the penal system in the county is working efficiently because it has a direct and substantial impact on how much it cost to operate the jail, which is a direct responsibility of the commissioners.

    What you see in the video is that the Gang of Four (Langley, Booth, Belcher and Klemm) refused to even try to get the information that would be needed to determine if the reported "overcrowding" of the current jail is cause to build a larger jail or if the current jail would be sufficient if the system operated efficiently.



    Not to be missed is Chairman Jerry Langley's comment at the very end of the clip. Responding to Hood's telling the Gang of Four that they are not protecting the constitutional rights of inmates incarcerated in the jail, Langley says: "we're not lawyers and we don't have anything to do with that..."

    To that we would ask Mr. Langley: So who is responsible for oversight of the operation of the jail? It is true that the Sheriff is legally responsible for managing the jail, but that begs the question of who is responsible for providing oversight? Certainly the Board of Commissioners has a duty to see that the taxpayers' money is not being wasted in how the jail is operated. Indeed, what brought all this discussion up in the first place was Langley and the Gang of Four's insistence that "we need a new jail." What if operating the judicial system more efficiently eliminated the need to build a new jail? Does Langley not believe that the Commissioners have a duty to try to do that?

    And the swing vote on the jail issue, Al Klemm, has written several times that the jail is overcrowded as a justification for not only building a new facility but for building one that will accommodate significantly more prisoners than the current jail. How does Mr. Klemm know his statements are correct, if he does not have the data and information Hood is seeking?

    Perhaps they don't want to know. Maybe they fear that if Hood gets what he's asking for that they will not be able to justify their position on building a new jail.

    Or maybe they are doing like they have done on so many other things: They just ignore whether county government is functioning the way it should.

poll#49
Considering that Beaufort County may build a new jail /sheriff's office: What should be the best course?
7.51%   Build a modern jail/S.O. in the southwest corner of the county
43.3%   Build a modern jail/S.O. behind the courthouse in the county seat
49.2%   Do not build a jail/S.O. anywhere
746 total vote(s)     Voting has Ended!

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