|
|
| Managing city jails may be as simple as managing boredom. |
| By stltoday.com - Editorial Board |
| Published: 10/19/2011 |
|
You can get a nice hotel room within walking distance of Busch Stadium for about what it costs the city of St. Louis to house one inmate for a day in one of its jails. It costs city taxpayers $110 a day for each inmate at the downtown City Justice Center and the Medium Security Institution (Workhouse) on Hall Street. The population fluctuates hourly, but as of noon Monday there were 1,950 inmates behind bars in the two facilities. That's $214,500 for Monday alone. That figure includes indirect costs like maintenance and debt service on the nine-year-old, $101 million Justice Center. Direct costs — food, medical care, personnel and the like — are budgeted at $62 per day, assuming a population of 1,450. The actual population now is about a third higher than that. This is a nice argument for quicker trials and greater use of alternative sentencing — drug and alcohol courts and electronic monitoring, for instance. This would cost the state extra money, and the state would rather dump the costs on city taxpayers. But that's a story for a different day. The purpose today is to suggest that for $214,500 a day, taxpayers have the right to demand better from the city's Corrections Division. Inmates need to be kept behind bars. Budgets should be met. If a gun is missing, it should be located right away, not 36 hours later. Bills need to be paid on time. Supervisors and employees need to pay strict attention to protocols, i.e., closing gates, checking to make sure that the noise coming from a cell isn't someone tearing up furniture to make a set of nunchucks. On Friday, Mayor Francis Slay's office released a report on jail operations written by Sam Dotson, a city police captain on temporary duty as the mayor's operations director. The report helps explain Mr. Slay's decision on Sept. 16 to suspend Gene Stubblefield, the commissioner of corrections. The Division of Corrections "does not pay close attention to the little details," Mr. Dotson wrote. "In fact, it has failed to pay close attention to some big things as well. It has experienced a systemic failure of leadership and the ability to follow tasks through to completion." Read More. |
Comments:
Login to let us know what you think
MARKETPLACE search vendors | advanced search
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
|
Have you been researching people online? You can read the answers revealed by a quora search from business leader Hamilton Lindley, who answers great questions with witty remarks. Check out his profile to see what questions Hamilton Lindley is answering!