NEWS
Committee weighs possibility of new county jail
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Tuesday, May 4, 2004
Jail overcrowding and inadequate facilities for inmates with mental-health needs has spurred talk of a possible new Dane County jail.
Last week, the Justice System Space Needs Sheltering Committee gave the highest marks to a new multipurpose jail-facility proposal after Sheriff Gary Hamblin said it would help alleviate the current pressures Dane County jails are facing.
Committee members looked at four options to deal with jail concerns. They discussed adding an additional three floors to the current facility, located at the top of the Public Safety Building; creating more jail cells in the City-County Building once the new courthouse is finished; building a new work-release/Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse facility; and leaving the situation as it is and hoping it will work out.
Hamblin’s suggestion for the construction of a new work-release/AODA facility will include more space for inmates with mental-health needs and also for those with maximum-security needs.
“The planning process is underway,” Hamblin said. “Our first goal is to get an expert in the field to give Dane County a direction to work in.”
The planning process will include hiring a professional jail planner who will look at population growth and changes in Dane County.
Other factors that will be considered include the maximization of space for inmates as well as maximization of a limited staff.
“In the 2002-2003 year, Dane County spent $1 million housing inmates in other counties, and for the 2004 year, we spent another $1 million housing inmates in other counties,” Hamblin said. “This $2 million will continue to go up because Dane County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the state.”
Hamblin said population increases affect crime factors and “not everyone moving here is free of problems.”
The Dane County jail system currently offers 15 jail-diversion programs, which provide programs that deal with issues like alcohol and substance abuse. Because of the population increase, treatment alone will not solve the issues of overcrowding or provide proper care for inmates with other needs, Hamblin said.
Ald. Austin King, District 8, said he fully supports increasing the availability of abuse and treatment programs instead of putting millions of dollars into the construction of a new jail facility.
“My preference has always been to spend money on programs that help people versus jailing them,” King said. “If we’re going to spend money, we need to spend it on AODA programs, not on increasing jails.”
The cost of the jail is controversial, as many Dane County inmates are sent to other facilities like the new Sauk County jail.
But while overcrowding alone may be a primary issue, the proper care for inmates with mental-health needs is also an important aspect to consider, Hamblin said.
“I look at the cells for inmates with serious mental-health issues and they are not appropriate or adequate,” Hamblin said. “Most national studies say 15-17 percent of inmates have serious mental-health issues, and we do not have adequate space for them.”
Dane County operates three adult jail facilities with a designed capacity of 942 inmates. The average daily population in 2003 was 1,049, or 107 inmates over the designed capacity, according to The Capital Times.
The increased overcrowding of Dane County inmates is projected to continue.
Currently there have been no estimates of the costs of the new facility, nor has there been a possible location suggested, according to Hamblin.
