“We need a bigger jail”

Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.

Sheriff Mac McNeill had both good and bad tidings to report to the Jefferson County Commission recently.
The good news, McNeill said, was that the jail had undergone the annual inspection for the Florida Model Jail Standards, which sets the minimum qualifications that jails across the state must meet to ensure that the constitutional rights of incarcerated persons are being upheld.
Before 1996, the Florida Department of Corrections set the standards and oversaw the inspections of local county jails. In 1996, however, legislation transferred the authority for the standard setting and inspections to the local level, placing them in the Florida Sheriffs Association and Florida Association of Counties.
A component of the standards and the inspections is the provision of medical care services to those incarcerated via an agreement with a licensed health provider.
McNeill reported to the commission on Thursday, April 6, that the jail had passed the inspection absent any violations. That was the good news, he said.
He then cited a section of the report showing that the jail had held 80 inmates at the time of the inspection. This brought him to his second piece of news, the not so good one.
The jail, he said, was equipped to hold 116 inmates at most. At present, he said, it was holding 89.
“At some point in the near quick future, we’re going to have to discuss what we’re going to do about this jail as far as expanding,” McNeill said. “And we need to have this conversation sooner rather than later.”
The sheriff didn’t assign blame to anyone for the jail situation; it was what it was, he said. The jail, he noted, had been constructed well, but it hadn’t been built with any thought of what the future might bring.
“Nobody expected today’s growth,” McNeill said. “At the time it was built, they were averaging about 20 inmates. They built a 117-bed facility and they thought they’d never see that capacity filled. Well, here we are now, right at 90 inmates a couple of weeks ago.”
The state attorney, he said, was working with his department to keep the numbers down as muchas possible. But there was only so much that could be done, he said, as the severity of many crimes didn’t allow for discretion of not holding the person in jail.
The facility also was aging, he said.
“It’s now 30 years old,” McNeill said. “It’s starting to show its wear and tear. It’s a 24/7 operation and it needs a lot of maintenance and upkeep.”
The question of the cost of a new or expanded facility naturally arose.
McNeill said a preliminary informal estimate that his department had gotten put the cost at between $10 and $12 million in present-day dollar value. This cost, he said, was for a single pod that would hold a maximum of 128 inmates but that had the capability of being expanded into a second pod if necessary.
“At some point, we’re going to have to have this conversation, and I think we need to hold it sooner rather than later,” he reiterated.
Another of questions that arose was the possibility of joining with Leon County in a regional incarceration facility.
McNeill noted that the Leon County Jail itself had reached capacity and officials there were considering whether to expand it or build a new one.
“If they decide to build a new one, having a regional jail would be a conversation worth having,” he said. “That way, we could share the costs, not just of running the jail, but also of the staffing. Of course, ours would be a percentage of the inmates housed. Other counties have shown an interest, but I don’t know if the timeframe is going to work out for us.”
A question also arose as to the cause of the higher incarceration rate and if it was attributable to the courts’ slowdown due to Covid.
“It’s a mixture,” McNeill said. “Covid started it. For sure, that’s one of major causes. But also, unfortunately, while some of the index crimes are down, we’re seeing some of our youths getting into crime much earlier. And some of it is very violent. So, we’re seeing that, a lot of young people getting involved in crime. That’s a whole other conversation that we can have. But it’s going take the whole community and a lot of parents involved to deter that situation.”
The index crimes are typically murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson.
His perception, McNeill said, was that the crime numbers were going to increase in the future.
“They say crime in Florida is coming down, and it may be true for the index crimes,” he said. “But when this new NIBRS numbers come out, it will tell the real story.”
The NIBRS, or National Incident-Based Reporting System, is replacing the traditional Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The difference is that unlike the UCR, which depends on an aggregate monthly tally of crimes, the NIBRS is reported to go much deeper because of its ability to provide circumstance and context for crime, such as location, time of day and whether the incident was cleared. It also reports all charges.
“It counts every crime,” McNeill said. “Before you have the top two crime counted, so if you have four charges, only the top two were submitted for the UCR. Now, everything counts. So, if they have eight charges, eight number get thrown in there.”
He added that other issues were also influencing the crime increase, drugs among them.
“We’re seeing meth and stuff like that now,” McNeill said. “It starting to seep in here. And with the drugs, come other crimes.”
McNeill didn’t say it, but with growth in population also comes an increase in crimes, and Jefferson County by all measures is experiencing growth.