Daily Press
Sheriff: $315K needed for jail

Original article

Sheriff: $315,000 needed for jail
The Newport News City Jail is the most crowded jail in Hampton Roads.
By SABINE HIRSCHAUER

April 9, 2008

NEWPORT NEWS
Sheriff Gabriel Morgan told Newport News City Council members during a work session Tuesday that he needs about $315,000 for the overcrowded jail for the fiscal year starting July 1.

The City Jail, which was designed to hold 248 inmates, is the most crowded such facility in Hampton Roads with as many as 700 inmates.

The additional money would provide $49,240 for personnel costs for a new jail annex downtown which is slated to open in September and will provide 105 additional beds. It also includes $134,286 for two substance abuse counselors, $15,000 for a GED teacher, an additional $50,000 for medical supplies and $67,134 for a mental health professional.

Almost 30 percent of the jail's inmates suffer from mental illnesses. But unlike other city jails in the region, officers and not mental health professionals screen inmates for mental illnesses in Newport News.

While the Newport News-Hampton Community Services Board helps the city by paying $50,000 toward the salaries of two substance abuse counselors, the city will need to come up with the rest of the money in times when the budget is already tight.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine provided an additional $42 million in the state budget to help the mentally ill for the next two years, with $3 million in each year for the mentally ill in local jails.

But none of that money will come to the City Jail.

"I am not anticipating to get any money from the state to offset our cost, treating mental health inmates," Morgan said.

Nationwide, counties and cities carry the cost of the "massive explosion in the jail population, which has nearly doubled in less than two decades," according to a new study released last week by the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute, a think tank that monitors and studies jail and prison populations.

Since 2001, jail population growth exceeded prison growth with a slight reversal in 2006. Between 2001 and 2006, prison populations grew 11 percent, while jail populations grew 21 percent, according to the study.

This has "serious consequences for communities that are paying tens of billions yearly to sustain jails," and "jails have become the new asylums, with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness," the study reads.

This is the think tank's first study solely focusing on city and county jails.

"Jails have historically been overlooked," said Nastassia Walsh, who co-wrote the study.

The jail study recommends improving release procedures for pretrial and sentenced inmates, re-examining policies for inmates of nonviolent crimes and diverting people in mental health and drug treatment programs to public health and community-based agencies.

The notion of consolidating the City Farm with the City Jail again surfaced as a way to save money and gain additional beds. The City Farm is a minimum security facility in the Menchville area and on average about 100 beds sit empty there primarily because it can only accept nonviolent offenders.

Morgan also cited the city jail expansion on West Pembroke Avenue in Hampton where a barrack-like warehouse was converted into a minimum-security jail, as an example of a low-cost alternative.

"I am not here to tell you to build another jail," Morgan said. "We could do it (a similar, warehouse-type jail) for $10 million to $12 million in an area which is not encroaching to the community."



More money for the sheriff
• $134,286 for two substance abuse treatment counselors

• $67,134 for a mental health professional

• $50,000 for more medical supplies

• $49,240 for the jail annex

• $15,000 for a GED teacher