The Jail Study's numbers are grossly exaggerated | Eastern North Carolina Now

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

    This is the first in a series that analyzes the Jail Study done by Todd B. Davis, Sr. with Moseley Architects. His title is "Director, Criminal Justice Planning and Development." He is a "Senior Associate" with the firm and has worked with Beaufort County's Jail Committee for the last few months. He is the person who apparently has assembled all of the data, analyzed it and developed the four "options" that were recommended to the Board of Commissioners at their February 14, 2013 planning retreat.

    The study, and the recommendations are now irrelevant, as a result of a motion ramrodded through the Commission by Jerry Langley before the expert even finished his report. Langley did so to get the decision made to build the jail at the Industrial Park rather than downtown because he was aware that other, less expensive, proposals were going to be presented. The vote short-circuited consideration of other proposals for the current site.

    Interestingly, not one of the commissioners who voted for Langley's motion ever raised the first question about the data in the report. On the other hand, Hood Richardson has constantly challenged the expert and the other members of the jail committee to consider less expensive alternatives than those recommended by Davis. Hood has specifically challenged the inmate census data and has, for the last few months, asked for a report each month on the daily census numbers. What those numbers show is that the average number of inmates typically varies from 70 to 90 prisoners per day. On a few occasions the numbers exceed 100, but apparently those days are caused by very short-term inmates who are typically assigned to jail on the weekends and allowed out during the week. Often these are child support convicts.

    Hood has also constantly complained that several inmates have been in the county jail for nearly a year and in some cases even more than a year.

    Most inmates are assigned to a county jail while they await trial. Once convicted and sentenced to a definite jail term they are then transferred to the state's correctional system. Thus, how fast they are tried plays a big role in how many are in jail. Hood has contended that an efficient District Attorney's office can reduce the load on the jail significantly.

    All counties have the ability to contract out the custody of prisoners. If the census exceeds the capacity of the jail at any given time, some inmates can be moved to adjoining counties by the county paying a daily fee to have them housed elsewhere.

    Periodically, the state inspects all county jails and they file a report. If a jail is consistently overcrowded the state will require remedial action. In recent months no such actions have been ordered due to overcrowding.

    So the first and foremost question that needs to be examined is whether we need a new jail and if so, how many beds are needed to meet the normal load put on the jail. The next set of questions goes to what actions can be taken to relieve the load on the current facility. Nothing was reported to the Commissioners at their "planning session" and none of those who claim we need a new jail even asked about mitigation measures that might be taken. Not one question was asked about whether speedier trials would help. Not one question was asked of the expert about how much it would cost to use contracting to house overload.

    The four proposals offered by the expert varied in the capacity a new facility would have. Option A (a multi-story facility behind the current courthouse) was projected to house 290 at a cost of $33.5 million with 94,460 square feet. Option B (also behind the courthouse) would house 262 beds at a cost of $28.2 million for 85,825 square feet. Option C would be a single story facility of 62,610 square feet for the jail with 25,145 square feet for a Law Enforcement Center (Sheriff's Office) for a cost of $23 million to house between 260 and 288 beds. Option C.1 is the same, except it excludes the Sherriff's Office/Law /Enforcement Center. That cost is projected to be $18 million.

    Now a cursory review of those numbers shows a wide variation in both cost per bed and cost per square foot. None of the commissioners questioned why that is.

    So the proposals call for between 260 and 290 beds. What follows is a technical discussion about how he computed the need for those capacities and we will show that 290 beds is perhaps three times as large as will be need and even 260 beds is more than twice as large as Beaufort County will need for our inmates.

    (Is anyone wondering if this is a replay of this same group of commissioners' overbuilding the school bond projects by $20 million?)

    So the first issue to assess in the study is whether the projected capacity is adequate, overblown, as well as accurate and reliable in projecting the need in the future. What the numbers show is that the projections are grossly inflated. So we turn now to a review of the data and methodology Davis uses to project the capacity that he says would be needed over the next 15-20 years.

    Immediately you run into the serious validity and reliability factors in Davis' projections. He does not include in the study the actual historical census of the real number of inmates per day that have actually been housed. Rather he computes an "Admission Rate" as a ratio of admissions to the county's population. And he uses only three years (2009-2011) of admissions. He then uses this "Admission Rate" (admissions per 10,000 capita) to project out 23 years (to 2035).

    Immediately one can see the problem in this methodology. He uses two variables: admissions and total county population, rather than looking at actual number of prisoners per day for a long enough history to validate a 23 year projection.

    We would contend that the total population of the county is more or less irrelevant in these computations. But if you are going to use population as an independent variable you would certainly have to compute the correlation between historical changes in the jail population compared to the changes in the total population. He does not offer any such correlation analysis.

    We would suggest that if population is going to be used as an independent variable to predict the number of inmates you would be better to disaggregate the population data. For example, we know that Beaufort County's population is becoming older, on average. And we know that older people end up in jail less often than younger people. Likewise, we know that the male segment of the population is incarcerated much more frequently than the female segment. To assume there are an equal number of males and females is obviously erroneous, but it would make more sense probably to use male population between 18-35 than total populaiton. At least a good study would have compared the correlation with each logical segment of the population if you were going to use population. A valid and reliable study would disaggregate the population segments to achieve a higher correlation. The Rule of Thumb in statistical analysis is that if you are going to use an independent variable to predict an impact you at least check the correlation between your dependent and independent varialbe. Davis does not do this in his report. But you don't need to worry about such things if you just ignore correlations (how one variable changes as another variable changes) as this study does.

    It does not make sense to us to even use total population to project inmate populations in the future. Why not simply fit a trend line to the historical inmate population? The answer to that question is obvious. If you expected your total population to vary significantly you would want to correlate total population to inmate population. But Beaufort County's total population is not expected to change significantly enough to be used as the predictive variable for how many inmates we'll have in the future. Given that, it would make more sense to simply project your inmate population in the future based on the historical trends in the actual number of inmates, on an average daily basis and compute the amount a variance around that mean.

    The State predicts Beaufort County's population will increase less than 2% per year through 2030. But Davis predicts inmate admissions will increase 53% over the same time period. It will take some convincing to get us to believe there will be a 50% increase in the average number of inmates per day in our jail.

    But an even bigger question is why Davis uses "admissions" rather than average number of inmates per day. Admissions are not as accurate a reflection of the load being placed on the capacity of the jail simply because it does not factor in how long each inmate stays after being admitted. One "admission" could stay 10 days, another 20 days and as is actually true another admission could stay 365 days. And of course the number of admissions would have to factor in the number already incarcerated when those admissions took place. Or to put it another way, if you base your projections on admissions you should also include the discharges also. What his data do show is the Average Length of Stay (ALS) fell from 11.9 days in 2009 to 11.1 in 2010 and 8.4 in 2012. Using admissions without adjusting for such a significant drop in the length of stay raises serious validity and reliability issues in the study's projections. While he compiled ALS for those three years, he does not show how he used that to adjust his "Admissions" data. Obviously if ALS fell that much, it should have pulled down the "adjusted admissions." He fails to account for this in his presentation so we don't know what impact he attributes to a very significant decline in ALS.

    But it gets worse.

    Davis projects the detention population to grow from 107 Average Daily Population to 171 in 2035. But the first problem with that projection is that he does not show the actual historical Average Daily Population for recent years. So we don't know if his 107 is accurate as a baseline. Recent reports have shown to number to be closer to 80 than 107. And not one commissioner asked what the Average Daily Population has been in the past. And remember, this number is a multiplican to which he applies the incremental multiplier, so any discrepancy becomes multiplied each year.

    But it gets even worse.

    Davis then "adjusts" his projections by increasing them by 20% for something he calls "Classified" and "Peaked." The study does not explain how this was computed or what it actually means but presumably it is an attempt to accommodate the variance from the average daily population. And that would be a valid exercise, if done correctly. But this is not the generally accepted way to compute how much variance there is around a mean. There are universally accepted ways to compute variance and simply inflating your base number by X% is not accepted as a valid way to do it. Simply stated this one factor makes his projected number of beds needed to be invalid.

    Now we get down to the nitty gritty. The projected capacity of a new jail is simply bogus. There is no way to say it in a nicer way.

    So this majority on our Board of Commissioners is talking about spending millions of dollars based on a bogus study.

    But it get even worse.

    Davis then added another 75 beds that he says will be needed each year between 2015 and 2035. He does so by adding 50 beds for housing Federal inmates and another 25 to house state inmates. In other words he claims the county can build 75 extra beds into the capacity and "rent" those beds out. But he gives us no data to show whether there is a "demand" out there for that many beds.

    There are serious questions about those assumptions because the reality is that in our region there are not that many federal and state inmates being contracted out. Pitt County overbuilt its jail on this assumption and that jail sits underutilized. And Pitt cannot fill its beds with a Federal courthouse in the same town. But beyond the statistics of that, the fundamental question here is whether Beaufort County tax payers need to get into the business of borrowing money to build a jail larger than the county needs so it can go into the jail bed rental business for the next thirty years.

    So in summary, we would contend, absent a justified explanation by Mr. Davis, that the design capacity of all of the options is grossly overstated. By grossly, we mean between twice to three times as large as the actual number of beds that will really be needed in the foreseeable future.

    Commentary

    It is distressing to us that the county paid big bucks for a study that is both bogus and useless. Based on our experience in supervising such statistical studies by graduate students, we would contend that there is no way this study would have ever been signed off on by any thesis or dissertation committee we have ever known.

    We don't say that to denigrate Mr. Davis' professionalism. Rather, we think this is a political document, driven by what he was told to produce. We think that accounts for his "adjusted" Average Daily Population projections.

    We suspect the "need" is inflated to try to make it look like simply expanding capacity on site cannot be done.

    So for those who read the first part of the analysis and began to wonder about the competence of either the researcher or the board members reviewing the study we would say: Consider another possibility. Consider the possibility that they know the numbers are bogus but don't really care. We think that is the case.

    We believe the decision to "build a new jail at the Industrial Park" is driven by a not-so-hidden agenda. It is not being driven by valid data and anyone who wants to contend that it is has a huge burden to show that we need a 280 bed jail to house Beaufort County inmates. We don't think that can be done. Mr. Davis has certainly not done that.

    But we will offer to Mr. Davis or any of these commissioners equal space to make their case.