With overcrowding continuing to be a problem at the Platte County Detention Center, commissioners this week briefly addressed the situation at their regular meeting.
At the Monday, April 18 administrative session in Kansas City North, commissioners gave an update – stating sheriff Mark Owen has been forced to send additional inmates to other facilities within the past week to relieve the pressure. Currently, the county is housing 21 inmates in outside facilities.
“It is alarming that by the time the jail overcrowding story hit the newspapers last week, the sheriff already had been forced to ship another group of inmates to Buchanan County,” said district commissioner Joe Vanover.
Presiding commissioner Ron Schieber said he’d asked Owen to provide data on the potential costs to keep inmates off-site through at least the end of the year.
“One of the things we’ve consistently heard about jail population is that we have 9,000 or so warrants out there,” he said.
County prosecutor Eric Zahnd is putting together a report on those warrants and how they could further affect the jail population if those warrants were to be executed.
Schieber said during a meeting held with fellow commissioners, the sheriff, prosecutor and presiding judge, a theory was discussed on the cause of the jail population spike – COVID hangover.
“The courts were a little slower, the crimes and arrests were a little slower because people were home,” Schieber said.
This theory attributes the current surplus population at the jail to a catch-up period as the justice system resumes more normal operations.
Although, other law enforcement officials said this may be a longer-term problem and unrelated to COVID.
The topic of construction of a new jail facility has been a hot one for nearly a decade, but Schieber was not ready to pull the trigger on Monday.
“For the record, this doesn’t necessarily mean a new jail right in the near future, from my perspective,” Scheiber said.
District commissioner Dagmar Wood said the sheriff’s office was compiling information on average daily population (ADP) dating from the last jail study, which was completed before the pandemic, to today.
In the past, critics have accused the county of inflating ADP by housing federal detainees for Immigrations Customs Enforcement (ICE). The county did earn extra cash housing detainees for a few years, but Owen said the county stopped housing ICE detainees in late 2019. One long-term detainee remained in the jail into 2020, but that was the last.
Vanover called on the criminal justice system to look for short-term fixes for the situation. Any cost estimates should include the cost of fuel and overtime wages for transporting prisoners back and forth, overruns for the food service contract and medical services and other costs.
“Paying other counties to incarcerate large numbers of our inmates could easily break the budget,” Vanover said.
Vanover said the county must rely on judges to determine if defendants are safe to remain at large pending trial.
“The cost of releasing the others will be far greater than the cost of paying other counties to keep them in jail,” he said. “I was informed that out of more than 200 inmates, 12 defendants were in custody for misdemeanors only. The vast majority of the people in our jail are accused of felonies.”
The current facility was built in 1998 with about 150 beds. Over the years, about 30 more beds were added, but opportunities for real expansion were few.
Serious discussions about the need to expand the jail facility kicked off around 2012 with a report by Captain Randy Pittman. In 2014, then-commissioners contracted Goldberg Group Architects to assess needs and come up with options – which included a $21 million 315-bed facility.
After the report of a commission-appointed study group – which included current district commissioner Dagmar Wood - concerns over the population projection data used by Goldberg and the price tag shelved the project for a few years.
In 2018, the commission hired consultant Bill Garnos, who reviewed the past jail studies and projected future needs. Late that year, he delivered a report stating the county could need to double its bed capacity over the next 20 years, to hold 376 inmates by 2038.
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, jail populations dropped, in part due to mitigation efforts to keep low-level offenders out of the facility. Now, the in-custody population is again spiking.
The Sheriff’s Office has agreements with other area detention centers to house inmates. In the past the agreements have been used rarely in special situations. This is the first time inmates have been moved to other counties to reduce the inmate population.