Where to put a new jail | Eastern NC Now

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

    There's been a lot of talk about a new jail in Beaufort County. One of the major issues that has yet to be settled is the site for locating a new facility. There has been a push to locate it in the Southside Industrial Park or some other remote location from the Courthouse. One of the issues in this debate is whether there would be room near the Courthouse for a new facility.

    At the November Board of Commissioners Hood Richardson made a presentation that shows pretty clearly that an adequate jail could be constructed adjacent to the existing Courthouse with a connecting walkway to allow prisoners to be moved from the courtrooms to the jail and vice versa. You can hear his presentation in this video clip from the meeting:



    In an interview following the meeting Richardson explained that he is not proposing a specific design for the jail. "What I did was take the standards the State mandates for jails and figured out the size that would be needed to meet those standards in terms of square feet. I used 100 cells with 200 beds. I do not know if we need that many beds but my calculations show that a facility could be located behind the Courthouse that could easily accommodate twice as many prisoners as our current capacity, and even more if we went with two floors. The idea is that the first floor would be elevated to allow for parking underneath so we would not lose any parking spaces. Or the facility could be built at ground level if alternative parking was more practical. The point is: We can build a jail adjacent to the Courthouse."

    Commentary

    In considering how large a jail needs to be, obviously you need to know how many prisoners you have to accommodate. So we requested prisoner census data from the Sheriff's Office to compute the average number of beds that would be needed and to determine the amount of variance from the average number. The Sheriff's Office refuses to supply that information. That leads us to suspect that they may actually not need a jail as badly as they contend they do. We wonder if they know. If they have nothing to hide and are not trying to hoodwink the taxpayers, we wonder why they will not release the data. Could it be that only rarely do they need more beds than they now have? Could it be that what they actually need is only an annex to the existing jail?

    At a previous meeting Commissioner Jerry Langley brought up the issue by saying: "everyone knows we need a new jail..." We now wonder how Mr. Langley knows that. At least how does he know an "overflow" facility might not suffice? Without the numbers how does he know what the "need" is?

    In fact, we have to wonder how any commissioner could conclude as Mr. Langley and Mr. Klemm (who has already announced that he believes we need a new jail and a new Sheriff's Office) that a new jail is needed without ever having seen the daily census over a period of time, or the demographics such as male vs female, number of prisoners who have had to be isolated, the length of stay of each prisoner and the type of offense/status re. bonds. Obviously is the 'excess population' comes from prisoners who might qualify for "electronic release" then more technology might change the need for cell space. If any of this data exists it is being kept secret. Wonder why? And again, wonder how any commissioner feels he can made an intelligent decision without the data?

    We'll keep you posted.