Inmate population exceeding facility capacity; prisoners sent out of county

By Loyd Cook

For a few years, the Navarro County Justice Center jail was able to house other county’s inmates and earn significant income for the county budget. That was up until about three years ago.

Then there was room just for this county’s prisoner population.

Today, 70 Navarro County inmates are being housed in the jails of other counties ... at a cost of $3,110 per day, according to figures provided to the Daily Sun Thursday by county auditor Paula Welch.

“If that level holds throughout September, that would be a cost of $93,300 (on a total-month basis),” Welch said. And, if that level were for a year, the cost would be about $1.19 million, she calculated.

Sheriff Les Cotten is concerned with the upswing in prisoner population levels, a number that has been slowly, but surely, climbing since 2000 with rare exception. And, for this year, that number has been increasing month to month.

“I’ve been talking to commissioners, telling them that we need to start acquiring land for expansion,” Cotten said. “We need to start planning now ... because it’s liable to take as long as five years for anything to come from it.”

Numbers provided by the sheriff’s office show an average daily prisoner population of 171 in 2000. Last year’s average was at 206 prisoners per day.

Through Aug. 31, the 2007 average was at 217 prisoners with the number remaining at or above 220 per day for 85 of the 165 days since March 19 with two of those days seeing the prisoner population topping the 300 mark.

The 220-prisoner mark has been reached or exceeded every day since July 23, according to that report, a run of 39 consecutive days.

That’s in a jail with a capacity for holding 260 long-term prisoners and a total capacity, including short-term prisoner space, of 297 total prisoners.

There’s another catch. The Texas Jail Standards Commission, as part of its regulations governing such facilities, sets a 10-percent “leeway” margin for the population, a figure set to allow for sudden spikes of incarcerations in a given day.

With the 260 long-term spaces, that’s a 26-inmate figure. So “Jail Standards” — as law enforcement officials call them — would be setting the daily population goal for Navarro County at around 234 inmates.

On Thursday, with 70 prisoners housed elsewhere with the county paying out money to other counties, there were still 235 inmates in the Navarro County jail, a figure that has Cotten’s attention.

“What if, this weekend, my deputies, the Corsicana Police Department officers, and Texas Highway Patrol troopers combine to arrest 15 more ... and 10 of them end up as long-term inmates,” Cotten said. “And then do it again the next weekend with the same result? What do I do then?”

“I’ll be shipping more prisoners out to other jails at a cost to Navarro County,” Cotten said, answering his own question. “And as long as (prisoner population) stays like this, Jail Standards is going to be looking at us real close.”

Jail Standards looked at the county jail in 2006, citing an understaffing problem for August of that year and said Navarro County needed 17 more jail officers, a fact Cotten relayed to the commissioners court in January of this year. To date, hiring has been done but when the latest few come on board in a couple of weeks, Cotten said he will still be four or five officers short of what Jail Standards said is needed.

And the prisoner population level in August of this year is higher than what it was in August 2006, the benchmark on which Jail Standards based its assessment.

A burgeoning resident population is part of the problem, the sheriff said, noting that more people doesn’t mean they will all be law-abiding citizens. With Dallas expanded about as much as it can to the north, east and west, the only direction for population shifts now is to the south. Ellis County is proof of that, he said, citing the explosive growth of the cities of Red Oak, Midlothian and Waxahachie during the course of the past several years.

He said he believes present population estimates for Navarro County are under-counted and that more people will be coming here to live and commute back to the Metroplex to work.

And more people here isn’t the only problem, the sheriff added.

“There’s some 600 outstanding felony cases in the system right now,” Cotten said, “and only one court to handle them with more coming every month. It’s more than one man (District Judge John Jackson) can handle when you factor in the family law and civil cases he has to handle too.”

The coming overload of the only Navarro County court with jurisdiction to handle these felony cases was foreseen several years ago, with a piece of legislation creating a county court-at-law passing the Texas House and Senate in 2001. But a coalition of area residents protesting its cost fueled a referendum that voiced a countywide desire to go back and pass legislation killing that same court.

That bill went through in the summer of 2003, just weeks before the court would have been officially created on its Sept. 1, 2003, start date. Proponents of that court had promised before the March vote on the referendum that even though it would be created, county commissioners would not fund it until it was needed, but opponents voiced concerns about that promise.

Now it’s needed, but it’s not there.

In the meantime, the jail population continues to swell. As other counties have done expansions — Johnson County recently opened a 700-plus bed facility; Kaufman County a 600-plus bed jail in the past couple of years — Navarro County has been at the same population maximum for more than 10 years.

The first phase of the jail — a 162-bed start — was opened Oct. 1, 1988. The second, and most recent, phase brought the inmate maximum to its present level of 297 beds on July 1, 1997.

The debt on the that second phase will be paid off in February 2015, according to the county auditor’s office.

In the meantime, the county is seeing its tax dollars going to other counties to pay for housing inmates as long as there isn’t enough space or enough courts to handle the process of administering justice.

The sheriff said, given the present situation, there’s a simple response.

“I hate to say it,” Cotten said, “but if you want law enforcement, you have to pay for it.”

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Loyd Cook may be contacted via e-mail at lcook@corsicanadailysun.com.

Inmate populations

Average per day

Year ADP*

2000 171

2001 183

2002 175

2003 198

2004 195

2005 213

2006 206

2007** 217

* Average daily population

** Through Aug. 31