SAN ANDREAS -
Calaveras County will have to raise an additional $4 million to
$5.6 million a year to staff the larger jail that will be
finished and go into operation in 2012. That's a daunting task
at a time when the county's $100 million annual budget is
shrinking by millions of dollars a year because of declining tax
revenues.
A consultant spelled out the logic and math behind staffing for
the new jail during Tuesday's Calaveras County Board of
Supervisors meeting.
Karen Leah Chinn of Chinn Planning, based in Columbia, S.C., has
spent a quarter of a century analyzing and planning jails and is
a member of the team of consultants planning the new 240-bed
jail for Calaveras County.
The current jail, with 65 beds, is so small that hundreds of
inmates each year are released early, and those who are
sentenced for misdemeanors are unlikely to serve much time at
all. It costs $2.1 million a year to operate.
The planned 240-bed jail, in contrast, would cost at least $6.1
million a year to operate with the minimum staff level needed
for safety, or about $7.7 million a year if there were enough
staff to allow correctional officers to do "direct supervision"
of inmates, Chinn said.
The jail's buildings will be designed to allow the possibility
for direct supervision, in which correctional officers spend
much of the day in common areas with the inmates. Research has
found that such direct supervision reduces violence, increases
safety for both correctional officers and staff, and increases
the chances that inmates will complete rehabilitation programs,
Chinn said.
Capt. Eddie Ballard, who is in charge of the jail and is
managing the project for the Sheriff's Department, acknowledged
that he, like other law officers, was initially skeptical that
it was better to have correctional officers spend significant
time in the same rooms as inmates.
But Ballard said he has worked in both indirect supervision -
where officers watch through bars, Plexiglas or television
monitors - and direct, and direct works better, even if
Calaveras County initially can't afford to use the method in the
new jail.
"The beauty of this (design) is we are not tying our hands,"
Ballard said.
Ballard and Chinn said the jail's design still allows for
traditional indirect supervision of inmates. A single
correctional officer, for example, could be in a secure area
conducting indirect supervision of two different jail pods
rather than having two officers doing the job, one in each of
the pods.
Using indirect supervision, it would be possible to staff the
jail with 50 employees, Chinn said. Doing indirect supervision
and also having full-time staff assigned to maintenance and
janitorial work would take the staff count to 71 employees, she
said.
County officials are looking into ways to avoid having to find
the full $4 million or more by leasing out unused beds,
negotiating a less expensive contract for jail medical care, or
initially staffing only 160 of the jail's 240 beds.
According to a study conducted before the launch of the jail
project, Calaveras County could get by with only 160 beds for
the next six years.
"That 160 beds is what we absolutely have to commit to building
and staffing," Calaveras Sheriff Dennis Downum said. |
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