Hood questions whether we really need a new jail | Eastern North Carolina Now

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

    At the January 7, 2013 Beaufort County Board of Commissioners' meeting Hood Richardson gave a "Jail Report" that he had request the staff to compile. The video clip below contains the report, with a bunch of numbers, and the discussion that followed. The conclusion was that the Board would invite the District Attorney, Seth Edwards, to the next board meeting to explain why several prisoners have been in jail awaiting trial for so long. Mr. Edwards had previously said that the delay in several of the oldest cases was because of the delay in getting DNA results back from the State SBI lab. Mr. Richardson checked with the lab and found that assertion to be questionable. He had also checked to find out about contracting with private labs to get DNA results and concluded that it would save significant amounts of money to resort to private testing if it would speed up the trials.

    But the big discussion was about the census numbers for prisoners in the local jail. County jails generally are for holding arrestees while they await trial. Once they are tried they are transferred to the State correctional system if convicted. In many cases they are released on probation. So the issue becomes how long it takes, on average to get a case tried and what the population trends are in the jail.

    Beaufort County has been debating building a new jail. They hired a consulting firm to develop a recommendation. The preliminary study proposed a new jail being built with a 288 bed capacity, with an anticipated cost of approximately 30 million dollars.

    However, the census report showed an average census for the jail, even with the old cases, of approximately 70 detainees, with the variance swinging widely. So the issue highlighted by the numbers is whether there is even a need for a new jail, and if so whether the county needs a 288 bed capacity facility.

    You can watch the discussion in the following video clip: