Return to story

JAMMED JAIL

February 12, 2006 3:29 am

IFTEEN NEW additions to the Rappahannock Regional Jail mill about one of the facility's TV rooms, watching the chaos unfold on "The Jerry Springer Show" while waiting for their cell assignments.

"What is this?" asks one of the men, jabbing at a yellowy goo in one of the depressions on his lunch tray.

Another inmate in an identical beige uniform and jail-issued sandals shrugs.

Within days, they'll each be assigned to a corner of the jail, where inmates sleep two and sometimes three to a cell, squeezing into 116 square feet of concrete-block living space originally built for one.

Onetime classrooms are crammed with bunk beds, turned into makeshift barracks to house the ever-burgeoning inmate population.

On this first day of February, 936 men and women press into a facility built for 656.

Where to put 15 more?

"We're just going to jam 'em in there somewhere," said Maj. Robbie Wilson, the jail's assistant deputy superintendent. "I don't know what else to do."

The regional jail, a sprawling complex off U.S. 1 in Stafford County, opened in July 2000 with about 400 prisoners.

Nine months later, it was overcrowded.

These days, the facility averages about 963 inmates a day--about 11/2 times its capacity.

Meanwhile, the number of correctional officers budgeted--166--hasn't changed since opening day.

The crowded conditions put pressure on the staff, not to mention the inmates, said jail Superintendent Joe Higgs, former Fauquier County sheriff.

"I feel some days I'm sitting on a powder keg," he said. "When that count starts hovering at 1,000 [inmates], I start cringing because I know I don't have the staff for 950, let alone 1,000."

Last summer, as jail officials sought state and local support for a $48.8 million expansion, the inmate population began setting records, spiking to 1,000 on some weekends.

At The Free Lance-Star's request, the jail provided a list of all the inmates who spent time in the facility over the four-day Labor Day weekend--1,066 in all, up to 967 on any one day.

The newspaper used jail and court records to find out where those inmates were from, where they were arrested and what kinds of charges they faced.

The population that weekend featured its share of minor offenders: those charged with shoplifting, reckless driving and being drunk in public.

But the majority of those held--77 percent--were charged with or convicted of felonies: murder, rape, assault, distribution of cocaine and such.

Even if the 245 inmates who were charged solely with misdemeanors had served no time that weekend, the jail still would have been overcrowded.

Though most of the inmates were arrested in one of the four communities that financially support the jail--Fredericksburg, King George, Stafford and Spotsylvania--they hailed from all over.

Twenty-eight percent listed addresses outside those four communities. But taxpayers here footed the bill for their stay, close to $75,000 total for the weekend. That's in addition to the $147,000 it cost to house the home-grown offenders.

Local taxpayers also will cough up somewhere in the neighborhood of $24.4 million to expand the 264,000-square-foot facility. Another $24.4 million is slated to come from the state Department of Corrections, though the final cost is negotiable.

The project received General Assembly approval last year.

Without the extra wing, localities would be forced to rent bed space at other jails, a much more expensive option in the long run.

While officials in Fredericksburg, King George and Spotsylvania backed the jail's expansion last summer, supervisors in Stafford deliberated an extra three months before supporting the project.

Spending tax dollars on a bigger jail isn't exactly a politician's fondest wish, said Stafford County Administrator Steve Crosby, a member of the jail authority board.

"The essence of the frustration is the money you have to put into constructing and operating a bigger jail is competing for money with schools, parks and recreation. All things being equal, people would rather spend money for schools, parks and recreation than building a jail," Crosby said.

"You don't have people showing up at a public hearing, saying, 'Build a bigger jail,'" he said. "But it's something you have to do."

The jail's daily population has jumped 74 percent in the last five years--more than four times the rate of the region's population growth.

Though most of the inmates are from the region, the area's location off busy Interstate 95 has brought drug traffickers and gang members from nearby metropolitan areas, law enforcement officials say.

According to jail estimates, about 40 percent of its population is booked on gang-related charges.

"Unfortunately, criminals don't have a boundary line," said Spotsylvania Sheriff Howard Smith, chairman of the jail's authority board. "They travel all over."

While the per-capita crime rate in the Fredericksburg region has dropped since 2000, the number of arrests are up, owing to a bigger population and a larger, more aggressive police force.

The judiciary is busier than ever. Judges in the 15th Circuit, who hear the felony cases against most defendants in the Rappahannock Regional Jail, handled more criminal matters in 2004 than judges in all but two of the state's other 30 circuits.

General District Court judges, responsible for most of the misdemeanor cases, ranked fourth in criminal-case workloads that year.

The bottom line: More police arrests and longer court backlogs mean a swelling population at the regional jail.

"This is the end result, and no one wants to look at it," Higgs said.

Local officials foresaw some of this. When they first petitioned the state for permission to build a regional jail in the mid-1990s, they predicted the facility would need space for about 750 inmates.

The state Department of Corrections said those projections were inflated. The scaled-back $53 million project included 656 beds--still about three times as many as were offered at the old jail on Lafayette Boulevard in the city and at the Stafford annex.

In the early days, the jail rented empty bed space to federal inmates, using the money--$40 to $60 a bed--to offset operating costs.

But it wasn't long before those beds were full of local inmates, and the jail had to turn paying federal agencies away, Higgs said.

Jail officials added bunk beds to some of the cells during the facility's first year, cramming two adults into a room the size of a walk-in closet.

Since then, some of those doubles have become triples, with one of the inmates sleeping in a large plastic "boat" on the floor.

Higgs, the superintendent, acknowledges that jail isn't supposed to be comfortable.

No worries. It isn't.

But cramming numerous inmates into small spaces borders on unsafe, he said.

"I give no guarantees at triple bunking. It's not a good work environment for the officers. It's unsafe for them," he said. "It's not a good living environment for the inmates. It's not safe for them ."

The safety aspect is the key concern for Kay McFadden, whose son Duane has spent time in the last year at the Rappahannock Regional Jail. It would be difficult, she said, to evacuate so many inmates in an emergency.

And she said she worries about the mental-health impacts of squeezing so many people into crowded cells and common areas.

"The overcrowding is ridiculous," McFadden said. "They're supposed to be punished by being locked up, not totally mistreated."

The crowded conditions can spark conflicts among inmates.

When an inmate breaks the jail's rules--for instance by cursing at an officer or mixing it up with another inmate--the jail holds a hearing to determine guilt or innocence and a potential punishment.

Hearings have become so numerous, averaging about 137 per month, that the jail recently designated an officer whose sole job is conducting them.

On top of that, the jail is down about 14 correctional officers, Higgs said.

Divide the remaining 152 officers by four shifts and you're left with 38 authority figures for nearly 1,000 inmates, a 1-25 ratio at any given moment. Higgs said he'd prefer that no guard be responsible for more than eight inmates at a time.

It's hard to recruit and retain guards when the starting salary--$28,000--is among the lowest for law enforcement officers in the region and health benefits aren't that impressive, he said.

Spotsylvania County Administrator Randy Wheeler, a jail board member, said the authority is undertaking a salary study to make its compensation packages more competitive.

"I'm losing [officers] to Stafford and Spotsylvania [sheriff's offices] all the time," Higgs said.

The 12-member authority, made of three representatives from each community that supports the jail, looked at alternatives to expanding the facility, Stafford Sheriff Charles Jett said.

Members even considered creating a minimum-security jail farm, a less-costly proposition hearkening back to the early 1900s.

But 80 percent of the jail's population at any one time has been charged and/or convicted of a felony, Jett said. A farm simply wasn't an option.

"The class of criminal we are holding really doesn't allow for minimum-type security," he said. "They need to be put in hardened cells with hardened walls."

And hardened walls cost money. The Department of Corrections has approved a $48.8 million expansion that would provide 432 new beds--twice that if the jail continues to double-bunk inmates.

The jail authority is hoping to open the new wing by fall 2008. The state would cover half the costs of construction, the four localities the other half.

Each community's jail payment is based on how many people are arrested in its jurisdiction and later incarcerated.

Stafford, responsible for roughly 44 percent of the inmates, paid the lion's share this year: $3.4 million. Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg offered up about $1.9 million apiece. And King George kicked in about $546,000.

The cost of the expansion will raise each community's annual contribution by about 40 percent.

Doing nothing and paying to house extra inmates in other jails would have increased those costs by about 100 percent, according to authority estimates.

"Obviously, it's money we would rather spend elsewhere, but it's a necessity," said Smith. "The jail board looked at every possible avenue of trying not to add onto the jail. We were just at a point where we have no choice."

At the request of the rest of the authority board, Smith sent a letter to area judges and commonwealth's attorneys in November outlining the capacity issues at the jail.

Overcrowding is not a factor when it comes to sentencing or allowing a charged individual to post bond, law enforcement officials say. But the authority has urged judges to consider diversion programs for defendants who are eligible.

At the moment, 1,515 people are participating in those programs, which range from substance-abuse counseling and anger-management classes to mental-health treatment and community-service work.

"Think about it--1,500 folks are in that program," Sheriff Smith said. "That's 1,500 folks we're not feeding and not housing every day."

Not everyone can serve their sentence outside the jail. Violent felons and repeat offenders aren't given that option.

Crowding or no crowding, commonwealth's attorneys say they're not willing to relax those rules.

"People who have questions about whether we're putting too many people in jail, take a look and tell me who you want to let out," said Stafford Commonwealth's Attorney Dan Chichester. "Who do you want to move in next door to?"

When space runs out in the Rappahannock Regional Jail, those inmates are farmed out to other facilities with empty beds.

It costs the jail $57.55 each day to house an inmate at the regional jail, but half that expense is reimbursed by the state.

When the jail has to rent space elsewhere, it pays $40 a day plus any transportation and medical expenses that inmate racks up. But the state doesn't reimburse the jail for any of those costs.

Adding to the crowding are inmates sentenced to serve time in state facilities. Even after their sentences are handed down, it often takes 60 to 90 days before state correctional officers pick up those defendants.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, 75 inmates at the Rappahannock Regional Jail were awaiting transfer to state prisons. That's half the number that awaited transfer when Higgs was hired 19 months ago.

Once, as a sheriff in Fauquier, he threatened to hand-deliver state-sentenced prisoners to the front steps of the Department of Corrections in Richmond to make room in his local jail.

When he renewed the threat as jail superintendent, the state picked up the pace, Higgs said.

Still, the expansion is needed--and it probably won't be the last. The jail population is forecast to be about 2,100 by the year 2019, overrunning existing and new jail space.

The next expansion discussion is likely to be controversial. Stafford officials have already asked that any future facilities be built in one of the other jurisdictions.

Politicians will have to grapple with the unpopular notion of putting a jail in the midst of existing communities--and spending top dollar to do it.

Higgs likens it to hiring more police officers or expanding a courthouse.

"Public safety costs money," he said. "Bad public safety will cost the taxpayers more."

To reach EDIE GROSS:540/374-5428
Email: egross@freelancestar.com