Experts: Crowding adversely affects jail

Evaluators say building has become a pretrial holding facility

A two-day evaluation of the Flathead County jail by experts from the National Institute of Corrections turned up something that surprised them and local officials.

If they believed that people are serving sentences in the jail, they're mostly wrong. Virtually all of the jail's prisoners - about 99 percent, according to evaluators - have not been convicted of anything and simply are awaiting trial. Only 1 percent of the inmates are serving sentences.

"In my view, [that] is a failure. I've never seen anything like this," said Robert Aguirri of Michigan. He said Monday that he's evaluated between 60 and 70 jails nationwide.

About 96 percent of the people in the jail this week are accused of felonies, he said.

"You made a decision somewhere that you're not accepting misdemeanants," Aguirri said.

On Wednesday afternoon, he and Fran Zandi of Denver presented their findings to officials.

"It certainly opened our eyes to exactly what is going on," Sheriff Jim Dupont said.

His office invited the NIC to scrutinize the facility and the justice system in Flathead County. The 20-year-old jail is overcrowded, Dupont said, and the county has to begin looking for solutions.

The NIC evaluation is a cannonball into the pool of data.

Evaluators toured the jail and met with officials from the justice system. They found a clean, well-managed jail that was built for a maximum of 65 to 68 prisoners, now routinely holding about 100. Services such as laundry, medical care, kitchen, storage and booking are about maxed out at that number, Zandi said.

Dealing with overcrowding in jails usually begins, and sometimes ends, with discussion about how many more beds the facility needs to accommodate its prisoners. There's much more to it, Aguirri said.

"How do you know what to build? And can you afford to open it?" he posed. Some jails open and then close because they're too expensive to run. Some communities open their jails to taking other communities' prisoners, for a price.

Before it can decide what it should do about its jail, the community has to decide what it wants its jail to be, Aguirri said.

As it is, often no room is available for another person who is accused of a misdemeanor.

"It's very hard to get somebody in there who needs just a moment to think about what's happening," Aguirri said. That means, "The system has lost an important tool" when authorities can't use the jail as a way to help someone understand consequences, even for a day or so.

Crowding "has totally affected every part of the system," he said.

The evaluators have suggestions for Flathead County.

They suggested forming a criminal justice coordinating board to stir together information from law enforcement, the jail, courts and other resources.

Officials should expand the data that the evaluators began collecting. They should formalize a pretrial release process, Aguirri said. The majority of bonds for inmates here is more than $30,000, which he considers high.

The county should develop alternatives to jail that require law-abiding behavior, Aguirri said. The county can decide for itself what they might be and who would qualify for them.

Dupont said the evaluations "puts us on the road to looking at what's going on."

The next step, he said, is to "sit down and analyze what to do to make it better."

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