Jail evaluation under way

By CHERY SABOL

The Daily Inter Lake

A professional evaluation of how criminal defendants move through the jail and courts is under way in Flathead County.

Two representatives of the National Institute of Corrections began their analysis Monday in the jail - long said to be overcrowded and, as the evaluators noted, the most visible symptom if something is out of balance.

Fran Zandi of Denver and Robert Aguirri of Michigan will spend three days gathering information for a report they'll issue in a few weeks. The institute does not charge for its evaluations.

Two things struck them immediately as they toured the jail.

The facility is "extremely well maintained," especially considering the 100 or so inmates held in a jail built for 64, Aguirri said.

It is also well managed, he said, and the jail, unlike some he's seen, passes "the smell test. It smells clean."

The management of the facility is apparent in the behavior of the inmates the guests saw and talked to.

"You don't hear inmates rocking and rolling," Aguirri said.

Zandi agreed.

"The inmates weren't kicking doors or hollering," she said. In some jails, the inmates are "so starved for attention" that the appearance of visitors sets off a tumult. Instead, prisoners talked to them civilly.

"That says something about the staff," she said.

"They're not just sitting outside watching" the inmates, Aguirri said, but have regular contact with them.

The staff, though, is limited by the space it can work with.

Five inmates were watching television in one cell area when the tour came through. Zandi chatted with them about conditions. One wished for "better food." Another said he wished the space was not so cramped.

"We got people sleeping on the floors," one told her.

Another volunteered to help create more space.

"I'll go home," he joked.

Some design flaws are apparent, Aguirri said.

The recreation room, intended for fresh air and exercise, is a block-walled space with a high roof covered in metal mesh.

It gets hot in the summer, jail Commander Kathy Frame said. In the winter, it snows inside, Undersheriff Mike Meehan added. A sign tells inmates they can't make snowballs, pile up mounds of snow or make snow angels on the floor.

Designers didn't anticipate the growing number of women who would be jailed, Aguirri said. That increase is happening nationwide and is apparent at the Flathead facility.

What used to be the jail library now houses women's bunks. A piece of fabric fastened over the window offers some privacy.

In a women's dorm down the hall, six fixed beds made of block and concrete are inflexible fixtures that make it difficult to add onto vertically for bunk space or to reconfigure, Aguirri said.

Adaptations have clearly been made since the jail was built. What used to be a female housing wing now holds "overflow males," according to detention officer Dave Hutton.

Fortunately only one or two prisoners require what would be described as maximum supervision, he said.

But still, nearly constant supervision of inmates is the responsibility of the jail, to keep prisoners safe from one another and to stay vigilant about prisoners who might want to hurt themselves.

Moving women down to a different dorm from what had originally been built for them put them in visual contact with the men, with predictable results. A curtain divides the two areas.

The jail operates with four 12-hour shifts of five people, Frame said.

The multilevel design of the jail is more "staffing-intensive" than a one-floor design, Aguirri said. It also makes adding on more difficult.

Booking areas - complicated areas in jails where people come and go - are now usually designed with a more open plan than the Flathead jail, Aguirri said.

The jail's infrastructure in the basement is "right at the tipping point now," Zandi said. The kitchen and laundry facility there can't service many more people.

An inmate Monday morning folded blankets in the laundry room, where towels, sheets and clothing also are washed.

Down the hall, lunch was being prepared. The jail kitchen serves more than 300 meals, also providing food to the juvenile detention center. The jail contracts with a food service to provide two hot meals and one sack lunch a day, conforming to national requirements for calories. It works well - until something goes wrong.

"This, to me, is the epitome of efficiency," Frame said. But "once you hit 100 [inmates], everything changes. We're starting to feel the strain."

A dishwasher that breaks down or an oven that malfunctions means "we have a crisis," she said.

Aguirri and Zandi learned about the locking-door security system of the jail, how inmates are moved to courtrooms and back, how officers monitor the prisoners. Zandi wasn't disappointed that the security system isn't dazzlingly high-tech.

"The trouble with bells and whistles is when they sometimes go down, nobody knows how to work without them," she said.

In the next two days, the evaluators will study jail data. They will talk to judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, county commissioners, police chiefs, mental-health workers and others.

Zandi said they will try to examine inmate-behavior management in the jail, assess the risks and needs of prisoners, whether housing is appropriate, whether prisoners' basic needs are met, whether the staff's expectations are conveyed, and whether inmates have adequate activities and supervision.

While the jail is the focal point, it's only because that's the part of the justice environment that people see.

A community has to decide what it wants its jail to do, Aguirri said. If there is room for few people accused of misdemeanor crimes because of the demands of people charged with felonies, "then this is a pretrial jail."

Aguirri compares the jail to a water tank. It doesn't function unless there is a balance of what goes in and what comes out, he said.

That balance is vulnerable and can change as society does.

"Twenty years ago, nobody thought about sex offenders" the way they do now, he said. Today, convicted offenders can be jailed for not registering where they live.

Methamphetamine also has impacted jails, with this region ahead of the rest of the country in terms of having to deal with jailing addicts who commit crimes, plus addressing the unique medical issues they bring with them, Aguirri said.

"Crowding isn't just a matter of bodies," Zandi said. Some facilities that have 200 people in a space designed to hold 300 people don't operate as well as jails that have twice as many people in the same space.

"Anybody can do anything in the short haul," she said. But it's only a matter of time until a plumbing system, medical providers, or some other aspect of the facility is overwhelmed if it is forced to overextend itself.

"You need to be on the front end of that," she said.

"It's a tricky issue, that crowding stuff."

Reporter Chery Sabol may be reached at 758-4441 or by e-mail at csabol@dailyinterlake.com