I had not heard this come up in awhile until yesterday. While you may not agree with every decision I make, you should at least know how and why I made them. As Sheriff I have to look at the overall big picture, not just focus on one area. This post is long and found on my campaign website but hopefully will help anyone that might still have questions. Why did you remove beds from the jail last year? This is a simple question with a complex answer. In order to understand the answer we need to understand how we as a county got to this place. In 2004, a new detention center was built to service all of the law enforcement agencies in Baxter County (this was prior to my first term in office in 2005). This detention center was paid for from the sale of the county-owned hospital. A good move because the detention center was paid for, however, no additional funding was provided to actually run the new larger detention center. Unlike most counties who also passed a sales tax to run their new larger jail, Baxter County officials did not put any funding mechanism in place to run a facility that is more than three times the size with an inmate population that has more than doubled. In the fall of 2011, the Quorum Court once again chose not to fund the $140,000 budget shortfall and had us take money from the following years budget. Because the Court did not have a long-term funding solution and it did not appear that they would address the looming crisis, I took a very bold and risky step and asked the voters of Baxter County for help. I aggressively campaigned for a ¼ cent sales tax – I spoke to over 58 different organizations, I conducted 11 radio programs, and my wife, Karen made an informative video (youtube/watch?v=89DqXmGroAE) which was sent to 3,000+ people and was on the Sheriffs website. I did my best to inform the voters of the dire situation, but the voters spoke. They were not in favor of a ¼ cent sales tax as a source of revenue for the jail. On December 4, 2012 the Quorum Court again did not address the budget shortfall in the jail. They passed the same tax levy creating no additional funding to the County and also passed the same level of funding for the 2013 jail budget which was projected to have a shortfall of $138,000. I was told I would just have to cut or make do with the funding they appropriated. The bottom line was this meant we would have to cut the budget expenses in order to live within our means. Just as it is painful when you have to cut your household expenses to make ends meet, we had some painful decisions to make in the jail especially when dealing with the number of inmates we could reasonably manage. By law, we CANNOT refuse to take an inmate unless the jail is at capacity or there are no beds available. It doesnt matter if they have expensive medical conditions (most people are not aware that once a person is incarcerated all Medicare, Medicaid and VA benefits stop and the County must pay for all doctor, hospital and medication costs). We are required by law to house, feed, clothe, provide medical care and guard all inmates -- and we have to take them if there is a bed available. Since we did not have adequate funding and because we must live within our means, the only logical answer was to reduce the number of inmates in order to reduce the cost to house them. Yet due to the law, the only way to reduce the inmate population was to limit the number of beds we had in our jail. We cannot physically leave the beds in the jail and simply say they dont exist -- they have to be removed in order to not be counted. While cutting out 58 beds might have seemed radical, it was the only logical way to make the reduction. If we had closed off two of our jail pods to eliminate 44 beds, it would have meant we would have to cram all male inmates into one jail pod or cell. Obviously, that was a disaster waiting to happen, and it would prevent us from conforming to the mandatory classification system which separates certain inmates. The only legal and practical way was to physically remove the beds. This was one of the most excruciating decisions in my nine plus years as Sheriff. My staff and I spent many hours trying to find another solution that was less painful, but no viable other solution could be found. I was fully aware of the impact to the community. Certain inmates were released and all pre-trial misdemeanor inmates were not housed; other law enforcement agencies did not have a place to take the person they arrested when our jail was full. But we had no choice but to live within our means based on the budget that was given to us. It was painful for my staff, the Sheriffs Office and the community. I believe once the community understood there was no other logical decision that could have been made, they contacted their Quorum Court Representatives and demanded they do something to fix the problem, and they did. Mid-year of 2013 the budget was adjusted to provide adequate funding for the jail through the end of the year and the Quorum Court passed a full jail budget for 2014.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:24:00 +0000
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