Font Resize
- Jails: Looking at alternatives
- Jun 26:
- Thanks to Oxbow, a breather in booking
- Judge sees option of shorter sentences
- Jun 25:
- An addicted mom's best 'Hope'
- Life coach is a game-changer behind bars
What if jail weren't the first stop for a junkie caught swiping someone's credit card to support a heroin habit?
What if a mentally ill man, busted for urinating in public, could get treatment before society sticks him in a cell?
And what if taxpayers could dodge the cost of adding more jail beds -- such as the 184 bunks scheduled to reopen at Oxbow early next month -- by helping nonviolent offenders defeat the demons of addiction, psychosis and homelessness, which so often drag them into the clogged corrections system?
Salt Lake County could be headed toward such an evolution in criminal justice, one that would channel more low-level lawbreakers into counseling and therapy, rather than cellblocks and courtrooms,
Truth is, Utah's most-populous county is straining under the inmate crush. The sheriff releases hundreds every month from the 2,000-capacity Adult Detention Center because of overcrowding and now is prepping a second jail, Oxbow, for operation. But even with the new beds, Sheriff Jim Winder concedes more jails offer only a short-term remedy.
"You can't build your way out of this problem," he says.
So the county is contemplating an innovation that would provide a "door No. 2" for nonviolent offenders suspected of substance abuse or mental illness who get nabbed on minor offenses such as disorderly conduct or petty theft.
Instead of putting them behind bars, police could send those wrongdoers to a "receiving center" that would assess their situation and recommend treatment, offering them a better shot at rehabilitation.
Criminal-justice experts see this corrections triage as the next big step for this valley of more than 1 million people, potentially reducing the population of drug abusers and mentally ill offenders who comprise more than 70 percent of the county's inmates.
"We need to turn off the spigot on the front end," says Pat Fleming, who oversees the county's substance-abuse division. "It's like a massive fire hose right now. People are just getting spewed out."
Bypassing the brig
Police busted Stefanie Wilson nearly a dozen times -- for drug possession, for shoplifting, for credit-card fraud or other petty crimes to feed her meth and heroin addiction.
Wilson did her time. But jail didn't cure the Sandy woman's drug dependency or the deeper scars of abuse she used her habit to hide.
It wasn't until her recent pregnancy that the 33-year-old Wilson -- on a jail referral -- entered House of Hope, a residential-treatment program for addicted moms in Salt Lake City.
"For
Now that Wilson, who gave up her baby for adoption, is in a full-time program, she is healing for the first time, focusing her energy on staying sober, not scoring her next fix.
County officials see a receiving center -- ideally next to the jail in South Salt Lake -- doing more of the same for other nonviolent offenders, steering them away from a jail cell and into community-based mental-health counseling or substance-abuse programs.
The approach has worked in Bexar County, Texas, where officials avoided building a 1,000-bed jail by centralizing services in a Crisis Care Center. The complex now diverts 800 people a month from the jail, providing
"We are freeing up space for violent offenders," says Leon Evans, president and CEO of the Center for Health Care Services in Bexar County. "It is the right thing to do."
A similar center took root in Orange County, Fla., freeing up 54,000 days of jail beds last year.
"You're paying a huge amount of money to incapacitate nonviolent, nonthreatening, usually nonconvicted people in your county jail," says Don Bjoring, who played a key role in launching the center. "If that's the policy, fine. ... Just remember, you're paying for it."
Salt Lake County is taking baby steps toward a receiving center with a five-bed pilot program -- soon to be 10 -- within the Volunteers of America detox center in Salt Lake City. Since February 2008, officials say, the facility has kept 634 people out of jail.
Daniel Medwed, a criminal-justice professor at the University of Utah, applauds this approach. It lowers the jail population and heightens the role of rehabilitation. He argues any potential drawbacks -- say a nonviolent offender who suddenly turns violent -- are "minor compared to the profound benefits."
Mayor Peter Corroon and the Salt Lake County Council took strides toward lightening the lockup load in 2005 when they established a day-reporting center. The center reminds clients about court dates, conducts drug screenings, helps with résumés and hosts classes. The program costs about $10 a day per person compared with $80 a day per inmate at the jail.
The reporting center has reduced recidivism rates in clients who complete the program by almost half, according to a U. of U. study conducted a year after its creation. But the center still lacks enforcement powers to keep offenders involved, which has limited its success.
Even if officials decide to pursue the next step -- a permanent receiving center -- the recession-racked county doesn't have much money to spend. Budget woes already have stifled alternative programming at the state level. Legislators sliced Corrections' 2010 budget by more than $28 million (about 8 percent). In addition to dealing a blow to a drug-offender-reform program and eliminating 160 full-time prison jobs, the cuts forced officials to close the Diagnostic Center at the Draper penitentiary.
It's an unfortunate trend, according to the Pew Center. The nonpartisan research group -- which reported that one in every 64 Utah adults is under Corrections supervision -- warned that program cuts "fuel the cycle of more crime, more victims, more arrests, more prosecutions and still more imprisonment."
Catch and release
Despite deep cuts, Salt Lake County still plans to reopen its once-mothballed Oxbow Jail in South Salt Lake. It's a $3 million move that, Winder argues, cannot wait any longer.
Proof is found within the booking room of the nearby Adult Detention Center, where an estimated 800 prisoners a month are set free without ever spending a night in jail because of overcrowding, according to a Criminal Justice Advisory Council report.
But that revolving door of petty offenders isn't the only problem. It's also the backlog of more serious lawbreakers -- such as those accused of domestic violence and drunken driving -- who now must wait in booking for a cell to open up.
"Those are [offenders] we can't kick out," booking officer Mindy Gleason says. "We have to keep them. A lot of people are just hanging out waiting to go to housing units."
Since Gleason started working at the county slammer in November 2003, she says booking has "definitely gotten a lot busier." And with the longer waits for jail beds, she adds, the potential for fights breaking out in booking has increased.
"They get really loud and rowdy," she says. "It's kind of nerve-racking. You listen for everything."
While the Sheriff's Office generally releases only misdemeanants to make room for more threatening offenders, the jail jam has become so severe that officials have had to occasionally free low-level felons. So the county reluctantly decided last year to provide an additional 184 beds at Oxbow.
Although seemingly a move toward warehousing wrongdoers instead of rehabilitating them, Jail Chief Rollin Cook insists Oxbow won't be a traditional cellblock.
"The whole point of Oxbow is to turn it into a therapeutic campus," he says, "where the point of their stay isn't just incarceration, but to prepare them for release into the community."
At Oxbow, the Sheriff's Office plans to nearly double the size of its substance-abuse program -- expanding it from 64 male beds to 118 -- and provide gardening and vocational training.
Backers hope the facility also will create closer ties between inmates and re-entry specialists, such as Johnnie Blackmon, who spends his days helping offenders figure out where they will live, how they will get a job and what treatment programs they will attend after leaving jail.
"I'm not going to kid myself that this is the newfangled way to solve all these problems," Winder says. "But if they are going to be in jail anyway, we have to make sure we are trying to help that process the best we can."
Community crime fighting
People such as Char McCuaig are trying to fight crime on the front end. Standing outside a single-room dormitory with more than a dozen men lying on bed mats, she says her Volunteers of America detox center is doing its part to slow the flow to the jail and, hopefully, rehabilitate its clients.
She doesn't pause when asked whether jail might better serve those within her care.
"This is a disease," McCuaig says. "Would a diabetic be better served in jail?"
A similar philosophy is applied at the House of Hope on Salt Lake City's scenic South Temple, where Program Director Melinda Melow-Murchie works with drug-addicted mothers who are trying to turn their lives around.
Within a colonial home, which resembles a bed and breakfast more than a treatment center, she oversees 35 women in residential therapy, 30 mothers who battle their drug addictions as outpatients and about 30 children.
"The cycle has to stop somewhere," she says. "If we aren't there, that cycle will continue."
The county's Jail Diversion Outreach Team has succeeded in thinning the number of mentally ill offenders behind bars (a population that accounts for 31 percent of the county's inmates).
Before the team formed, the average mentally ill inmate had been booked 19 times and served 551 days in jail. In one instance, a man in his mid-to late 20s was held 52 times for offenses as minor as arguing with a soda machine at a fast-food restaurant. He logged 1,670 days in custody -- more that 4½ years.
Since the outreach team's arrival, all those numbers have dropped, says Jeannie Edens, coordinator of the county's mental-health program. And soda-machine man has spent just two days in jail since October 2007.
And so the treatment continues from a red-brick chapel on Salt Lake City's west side (known as the First Step House) which provides full-time help for recovering junkies to the Project Reality offices on 700 South, where doctors prescribe medication to help opiate addicts kick their habit.
Unfortunately, bed space in community programs is scarce, too. The Utah Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health estimates that more than 44,000 people in Salt Lake County need treatment to overcome their addictions. But the county now has only 7,000 slots in residential and outpatient programs.
"If we put them in a jail, it doesn't solve the underlying reason why they are in jail," Corroon says. "Oftentimes, if you put someone in jail, it makes them a better criminal, unemployable in the future and isolated from their families -- none of which are good options."
But until those better options are fully in place, the county will be clanking open more cell doors.
When it reopens in a few weeks, Oxbow will bring 184 badly needed jail bunks to Salt Lake County's cramped criminal-justice network. Perhaps more valuable, though, will be the expanded treatment programs it will bring to the inmates housed there.
