Clinton sheriff arranges jail study
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By Steven Martens | Saturday, November 24, 2007 |
CLINTON, Iowa — The opening of the new Scott County Jail in Davenport is good news for Clinton County Sheriff Rick Lincoln. He won’t have to send his deputies nearly as far to transport inmates to and from other jails.
The Clinton County Jail’s lack of space has become such a problem that Lincoln arranged for a team from the National Institute of Corrections to come to Clinton from Jan. 14 to 16 to assess the facility and how the criminal justice system functions in Clinton County.
The jail has a capacity of 44 inmates. At one point in July, the cells were full and the county housed 31 inmates in other jails.
Lincoln said this year’s budget includes $300,000 for housing inmates in other county jails, including Dubuque and Cedar counties in Iowa and Carroll County in Illinois. Through the first three months of the fiscal year, 44 percent of that budget has been spent, Lincoln said.
That cost does not include paying for fuel to transport the inmates and wages of the deputies who spend their time transporting inmates instead of patrolling the county.
“Obviously, we’ve got to figure out something because we can’t afford to continue on this way,” said Jill Davisson, chairwoman of the Clinton County Board of Supervisors.
The jail, built in 1969, also is becoming more expensive to maintain and its design is a problem, Lincoln said. Having offices for sheriff’s department employees and dispatchers on the first floor and the jail on the second floor has created problems with water leaking from the jail to the offices below from faulty plumbing or vandalism by inmates, Lincoln said.
An inmate once shoved his pants into the toilet and flushed it repeatedly, causing serious water damage in the offices below. Lincoln said it makes him wary about leaving important papers on his desk.
“Every night when we go home, we have a plastic cover we use to cover up our monitors, our keyboards and our CPU,” Lincoln said.
The problem:
The Clinton County Jail, able to hold no more than 44 inmates, lacks space, and money to spend on housing remaining inmates in jails in other counties is nearly half spent only three months into the new fiscal year.
Possible solution:
The National Institute of Corrections will come to Clinton from Jan. 14-16 to assess the jail.
The goal of the free assessment is to determine if the problem should be solved with a bigger jail, programming in the community or changes in how the criminal justice system functions to reduce the number of inmates at the jail, or some combination of both.
After touring the jail and speaking with criminal justice officials, the assessment team will meet with officials to present their findings and make recommendations.
The county has budgeted $15,000 for a needs assessment of the jail if the NIC team recommends adding onto the current jail or building a new one.
Steven Martens can be contacted at (563) 659-2595 or smartens@qctimes.com.
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