Article published February 25, 2007

New state prison limits frustrate officials

RACHEL E. LEONARD, Staff Writer

Society doesn't want them.

Neither do the jails.

And the prisons don't want too many.

In Spartanburg County, convicted criminals file into a van Mondays and Wednesdays for the trip to a S.C. Department of Corrections evaluation center. But only eight at a time.

The van leaves behind dozens of men who have already been sentenced to prison. In the meantime, those inmates wait in the Spartanburg County jail, receiving food, housing and health care on the county dime because of new corrections department limits on how many prisoners the state accepts each week.

Two months after state corrections Director Jon Ozmint announced the new limits, jail administrators' frustration has turned to exasperation, and state legislators are stepping in.

State senators, including John Hawkins and Glenn Reese of Spartanburg, have expressed their concerns to Ozmint. Sen. Mike Fair, a Greenville Republican who chairs the Senate finance subcommittee for corrections and public safety, has organized an ad-hoc committee charged with finding a short-term solution to the standstill.

But that committee, which had planned to announce recommendations at a hearing Wednesday, saw their top option fall through last week when they learned they couldn't house incoming state prisoners at an unused Columbia facility.

Overcrowding

Spartanburg County can transfer only 16 male and three female inmates to prison weekly, and on Wednesday 31 men were waiting. Ozmint introduced the new limits to mitigate overcrowding and staff stress at state prisons, but arguments that the changes have aggravated the same problem at the local level have fallen on deaf ears.

"I don't mind cooperating, and I understand his problem," said Larry Powers, Spartanburg County jail director. "His problems are a mirror image of my problems. It's just that I can't push my problems off on someone else."

Ozmint has declined to publicly discuss his new policy. His directive and his unwillingness to speak with concerned parties unleashed a wave of complaints from jail administrators, said Kathy Williams, assistant director of the S.C. Association of Counties.

"It was immediate and it was very negative," she said. "It was all over the state. A lot of the jail administrators weren't aware there were ever any quotas in effect. We weren't aware there were ever any quotas in effect."

With two criminal Circuit Court sessions scheduled for next week, the number of sentenced inmates awaiting transfer in Spartanburg County is expected to rise. They are housed with inmates awaiting trial, packed into cells designed for two but with triple bunk beds and an additional cot on the floor. More than 800 inmates were housed at the jail this week, at an average of $43 per inmate per day, in facilities with room for only 586 people.

At the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Richland County, 26 inmates already sentenced were awaiting transfer to state facilities as of Tuesday. Center Assistant Director Kathy Harrell said the back up hasn't adversely affected jail operations there yet, but the limits could pose a problem in the future.

"The state is saying we're not taking any more," she said. "We don't have that ability to tell the arresting agency we're not taking any more."

Smaller jails are faced with more problems. In Union County, limited to transferring two inmates per week, eight sentenced inmates were awaiting transfer Wednesday from the 40-bed facility.

"It's posed a problem with us because we're such a small operation, such a small jail, and having all these inmates has cost us money," said jail administrator Lt. Jeff Lawson.

Fifteen inmates were waiting for transfer Thursday at the Beaufort County jail, said jail director Philip Foot. A few weeks ago, that number was 30.

Searching for solutions

The new corrections department limits were based on examining five years of data on how many inmates were transferred to DOC custody annually from each county.

Ozmint said similar limits were already in place but were enforced in an inequitable manner, but Powers, who has worked at the Spartanburg County jail for 25 years, said he had never heard of them.

Jail administrators have taken the stand that state law makes clear that inmates serving sentences of more than 90 days are in state custody, and the state can house those inmates in county jails only with the consent of local officials.

Fair's ad-hoc committee included Ozmint and representatives from the S.C. Association of Counties, jail administrators and sheriffs. The idea on the table was two-tiered - use $2 million to staff the recently built, 256-bed prison in Columbia, which is not in operation, and spend another $2 million to increase staff at the state's central prisoner intake center in Columbia.

And the limits on how many prisoners the state will accept, Fair said, "have to go."

But the Columbia prison option was wiped off the table last week when the ad-hoc committee learned the corrections department already planned to use it for other prisoners. A Department of Corrections representative previously told the group the facility was up for grabs, Williams said. It was disappointing news.

"It's great that they've got additional space for their folks, but we're the ones who are continuing to hold prisoners for a long period of time," Williams said. "And we're already overcrowded in many jails and we don't need to be holding state prisoners."

There is a long-term solution, Fair said: The state needs two new prisons. But that option isn't a rosy one for the counties.

"We don't think we can do that until we have a rather large bond bill, and we can't do that this year, but we might can do it next year," Fair said.

Someone could challenge Ozmint in court, but Powers doesn't think anyone wants to do that.

One committee suggestion was that the state could compensate local jails for keeping state prisoners, but Powers said that idea amounted to a tacit approval of the limits. He also questioned whether such compensation would cover actual costs for a jail expansion, medical treatment and additional personnel.

"If you ever start accepting money from them, then you're stuck with them, and it'll be a bigger problem," he said.

Rachel E. Leonard can be reached at 562-7230 or rachel.leonard@shj.com.