The Sheriff and the Jail, Gifts That Keep Giving | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post appears courtesy of the Beaufort Observer.

    About half of the jail is shut down at an unbudgeted cost oaf about $2,500 per day. Two thousand dollars pays other jails to house our prisoners and $500 is additional cost to transport them back and forth for trial dates. That comes to $75,000 per month. Estimates are this will go n for at least another six months. It has already been going on for about three months . That comes to $675,000 of wasted expense this year.

    The Sheriff says the cells are broken and cannot be operated safely.

    Here is the incredible part. The sheriff has not called anyone to repair or try to fix the cells. Even more puzzling is we are going thru a slow process of formal bids to replace the electronic system and the cell mechanical equipment. The excuse given by the county manager is the cost will be more than $500,000 so state law requires a formal process. That is simply and excuse. There are provisions for emergency repairs and these repairs could be broken into parts in order to expedite work. However, if we do any of these things some county employees may have to do some work for their pay. They may even have to stay after 5:00 pm.

    . For those with common sense, we have a jail with dangerous people in it and we did not call for cells to be repaired but we are going thru a lengthy process that will be very expensive to modernize the electronic syst4em and replace doors. Again, for those with normal intelligence, why not make temporary repairs while we get bids and figure out how to make log term repairs.

    When the sheriff reported to the commissioners at the budget retreat, half of the jail had already been shut down for at least 6 weeks, The sheriff never reported the seriousness of the problem, we had to figure out what was really going on. Why did he not notify the Board of Commissioners the first day cells were shut down?

    When I say sheriff, I am including anyone who works for King Ernie.

    Let us return to our old friend, common sense. The sheriff never reported to the commissioners that there were serious problems with the jail doors. I t never came up in budget sessions. Did 40 cells suddenly become inoperative?

    I for one do not believe we had a catastrophic failure of these cells.

    Even more alarming is that only two commissioners (Stan Deatherage and myself) are concerned that we need to repair the cells while we solver the bigger problem of long term repairs. Look at the hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be saved.

    I spent the last three weeks exchanging emails with the county manager and the sheriff. I asked one question "WHEN AND WHO DID YOU CALL FOR REPAIRS?' I do not have an answer. I proffered to the manager that we are well into the area of "fiduciary responsibility" for all elected

    officials and be bumped the question to the chief deputy who has not responded during the past 10 days.

    What would you do with anything you own that was broken? Try to get it repaired. I bet there are not many things you throw in the trash without trying o repair them. Especially large items.

    When I look at the $100,000 of un needed uniforms and gun changes made just before the election last year, the million dollar medial cost for one prisoner and the close to one million dollars of wasted jail cost, with no push back from the commissioners I can only conclude that both the sheriff , and commissioners are demonstrating incompetence or manipulating the system to convince the public to build a new jail.

    Commissioners have the duty to control all county spending. The sheriff contends that he cannot be controlled by commissioners because he is a constitutional office. The constitution makes the sheriff responsible for the jail and directs that he serve warrants. North Carolina law is very clear that the sheriff does not have taxing authority, only the commissioners. You, the taxpayer provides the money.

    Anyone who pays taxes should be very concerned about what is happening in Beaufort County. Even if the commissioners cover this up this year, eventually taxes will have to be raised.

    We are denying justice to almost all prisoners. We have about 18 people in jail who have been there for between 6 months and 2 years without a trial. The Constitution f the United States calls for a speedy trial. If we simply tried prisoners timely we would need a jail half the size that we have.

    The sheriff is not the only culprit in this jail situation. Judges, district attorneys, and defense lawyers can all do a lot more to clean out our jail. Some day some smart lawyer is going to sue all of us on the issue of a speedy trial. The size of the jail and whether new or not has nothing to do with speedy trial issues. Speed trials solve a host of problems like the need for medical care and keeping prisoners out of county.