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| Tennessee Prison Overcrowding May Hinder Local Solution Efforts |
| By The Leaf-Chronicle/Gannett News Service |
| Published: 03/05/2003 |
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County sheriff's officials are worried their planned jail expansion -- designed to meet the county's needs through the year 2025 -- will fill within 10 years unless the state solves its prison overcrowding quickly. Because of the state prison system overcrowding, jails across Tennessee are routinely housing state inmates for months -- and even years -- before penitentiary space opens for them, Sheriff Norman Lewis said. 'The county jails were never set up for people to do long-term sentences,' said Ed Patterson, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. For example, the county had 20 state inmates in the county jail on Monday. Nearly six months ago, there were 70 awaiting space in the state prison system, prompting local officials to ask the state for quicker relief. The situation has financial and legal ramifications in Montgomery County, Lewis said. It's particularly tricky here because the current jail has been under a federal magistrate's order to limit the number of prisoners leading to overcrowded conditions for several years. As part of the solution, the Montgomery County Commission authorized a major jail expansion, which will increase the current prisoner capacity to 936 beds. Until that expansion is finished, judges have been keeping the numbers below the magistrate's cap by deciding whether people awaiting trial on misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies should have their bonds reduced substantially or be released on their own recognizance. However, the state prisoners cannot be released so it compounds the overcrowding problem locally, Lewis said. 'We've had to deal with this situation of state inmates even though we are overcrowded,' Lewis said. 'I suspect we'll see our state inmate population really grow once the jail addition is complete.' And financially, local taxpayers are paying for the state's prison overcrowding problems, Patterson and Lewis said. 'Montgomery County taxpayers are supplementing the state budget every day a state prisoner sits here,' Patterson said. The county's cost to house prisoners is $53 daily, but the state has capped reimbursements to the local jails at $35 daily, Patterson said. There are about 26,000 felons housed in Tennessee prisons and county jails at any given time, at an average cost per inmate of $47.63 per day. If present laws and procedures remain in effect, correction officials estimate the state will need 7,097 more beds by the end of 2111. One of the contributing factors to the need for more prison beds has been a decline in the percentage of felons receiving parole, from 34.9 percent in 1995 to 24.7 percent as of last August. One of the early decisions facing new Gov. Phil Bredesen is whether to follow the recommendations of former Gov. Don Sundquist to build a prison of 1,400 to 1,600 beds in Weakley County and to add 700-900 beds to a facility in Bledsoe County. |
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