Jail inspection on Glasgow daily times Jail receives - TopicsExpress

Jail inspection on Glasgow daily times Jail receives inspection report By MELINDA OVERSTREET 03/26/2014 11:37 PM The Barren County Detention Center held too many inmates on the date of its last Department of Corrections inspection in February, but that was the only instance of noncompliance found. The jail’s capacity is 178 permanent beds, and the inmate count on Feb. 26 was 192. Of those, 139 were state inmates, meaning they have already been convicted of a felony. The state pays county jails to house such prisoners. Each of nine “dorms” had as many as four more inmates than permanent beds available, resulting in a failure to meet the ratios of space, drinking fountains, toilet facilities, tables and benches and bunks required by Kentucky Administrative Regulations. Barren County Jailer Matt Mutter said that, relatively speaking, this degree of overcrowding is a “very small” problem to have. A total of 187 items are checked during the inspection process, and several have multiple parts. Along with the report, a new certificate of occupancy was issued that is valid until the next inspection, which typically occurs in late summer or early fall. The jail is informed of the date of the first inspection each year, but the second is unannounced, Mutter said. No issues of noncompliance were found in either inspection in 2013, one in May and the other in August, according to letters from Jeff Burton, director of the Division of Local Facilities. A full report on the February findings is dated March 10. The attached letter from Paula F. Holden, deputy commissioner of the Division of Local Facilities within the Department of Corrections, recommended that Mutter meet with Barren County Judge-Executive Davie Greer to review the report and develop a plan to correct issues of noncompliance. The jail had 30 days to submit that plan. The plan, dated March 25, involves rotating inmates to less-populated cells and working with the district judge to lower bonds to promote speedy releases. “We don’t know from day to day how many county inmates we’ll have,” Mutter told the Daily Times. “The local judges and the pretrial system are responsible for getting bonds set for our county inmates, and compared with some other counties I’ve talked to, we do really well in keeping our county inmate numbers low.” Other options are less than ideal. “We can transfer state inmates out,” Mutter said, “but we don’t want to do that because that’s our main source of revenue. And that would affect our work crews because we would have less state inmates and those are the inmates that are on those crews. ... We would have to cut services to some (places), a lot of the nonprofit organizations.” The facility averages 70 percent to 80 percent state inmates. For each of those, it gets a per-day reimbursement of $31.34. Barren County also typically houses five to 10 inmates for Metcalfe County, which doesn’t have a jail, so Metcalfe County pays Barren County $28 a day for each of its inmates. “I don’t want to trivialize the overcrowding issue,” Mutter said, “but if I had 192 every day of the week, I would take that. We can handle that issue. ... I don’t think the DoC inspectors were upset with it either. They said they’d seen a lot worse.” They are obligated to report it, though, he said. “When we get up close to the 200 level, that starts putting a strain on us, not only with staff because we’re operating at a bare-bones staffing level anyway, but it also puts a strain on our amount of supplies,” he said. The jail keeps supplies for up to 200 people, just in case, Mutter said. “We have been over 200 at times. It doesn’t happen very often, but it has happened,” he said. Despite the crowd in the men’s “dorms,” Mutter said the jail has empty beds on the women’s side, because there aren’t as many female state inmates. In an email to Barren County magistrates with the current inmate count as of Tuesday – 187 as of 12:45 p.m. – Mutter said, “I was extremely pleased with our inspection report. The credit goes to my deputies and staff.” Share Story ©2013 Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. • CNHI Full Site