Late-night jail talk
Thursday's 6 1/2-hour Guilford County commissioners meeting produced a host of short-term fixes to crowding problems at the county jails. Commissioners also voted to find and hire an architect to design a downtown jail.
We didn't get all this in the deadwood edition, so Scoop readers get the news first. At around 1 a.m., commissioners voted to:
- Remove federal prisoners from the jail system next spring, freeing up space for county inmates. The county now has a contract to house federal prisoners and earns money on the deal, but that contract runs out at the end of March.
- Ask the state prisons to take inmates serving sentences of 30 days or more from the county jails. State prisons hold inmates serving longer sentences, while county jails typically hold prisoners who are serving shorter sentences or awaiting trial.
- Move 40 inmates to the county prison farm. Sheriff BJ Barnes has said the farm needs security upgrades to house the prisoners.
- Move 25 inmates to jails in other counties.
- Hire an architect with jail-building experience to design a jail with 600 or so beds for a tract behind the existing downtown Greensboro jail that's now occupied by a parking lot. Any design would have to accommodate future expansions.
- Add 15 new jail officers to improve safety at the existing jails.
Left unclear was how much this would cost and how the county would pay for it. The board had discussed emptying about $1 million from an account called the inmate welfare fund, but it was decided that money would be used only as a last resort. The final tally will likely be well above $1 million for the budget year ending June 30.
After the meeting, County Manager Willie Best said he didn't know where the county would find the money. One solution is a pool of unappropriated funds that the county keeps in reserve.
The measure passed 7-3, with Democrats Melvin "Skip" Alston, Carolyn Coleman and Bruce Davis voting against. Those commissioners expressed support for letting a jail committee continue to study the problem. After the vote, Alston resigned from the committee.
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