Panel To Present Jail Plan In January Capacity Could Be Raised From 127 To 400 To Meet Needs Until Around 2015

In Kootenai County’s jail, inmates are permanently housed in holding cells, only one person can comfortably walk through the infirmary and supplies are crammed into every available nook and cranny.

“The jail is bursting at the seams,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Nile Shirley. “We are in dire need of space here.”

For the past six months, solving that problem has been the top focus of a citizens committee formed to streamline the county’s criminal justice system.

The committee plans to present a report to the county commissioners in January, detailing plans to expand the county jail. The committee also will be available to meet with community groups to discuss its findings.

Commissioners would have the final say on any expansion plans.

“Everyone agrees there is a need for more jail space. The only question is how much,” said Tad Leach, a committee member, retired police chief and law enforcement instructor at North Idaho College.

Although the committee is studying the county’s entire criminal justice system, overcrowding became the short-term focus because of the time it would take to expand the jail.

“It’s going to take three years before we can get (prisoners) in there. Clearly this is a crisis mode that we’re in,” Leach said.

The jail was built in 1987 to house 95 inmates, then was expanded in the early 1990s to a capacity of 127. Average daily inmate populations have topped that since 1995. The jail hit an all-time high of 217 inmates one day in October.

Shirley said the committee likely will recommend that the jail be expanded to hold at least 400 inmates. Estimates show that the jail would have a daily population of at least 380 inmates by 2015.

But committee members said designing a jail is not as easy as just lining up beds in a secured room. Isolation cells must be available for problem inmates, men must be separated from women and people with communicable diseases must be segregated.

Leach said people frequently criticize the jail, saying too much space is taken by those who have committed minor offenses. But Leach did a one-day study of the jail population showing that 85 percent of the inmates had one or more felony charges or multiple misdemeanor charges.

“The people that are in jail deserve to be in jail,” Leach said. “The system is not ‘just throw everybody in jail.”’ On Wednesday, eight committee members traveled to Yakima, Wash., to visit a jail considered by many in law enforcement as a model for conservation of space and personnel.

Yakima’s 356-prisoner annex was built in 1993 for about $3 million.

Some 64 prisoners are housed in each of five cellblocks with an additional room for work-release inmates. The rooms are dormitory-style, meaning each contains 32 double bunks, with a day room shared by all. The cellblocks surround a secured central control room, where one deputy can keep an eye on all the inmates at once and radio for help if needed.

In the Kootenai County jail, inmates are spread out in two main areas. Though all are locked down, the south section is unsupervised. In the north section, one deputy dashes back and forth in a large control room, trying to watch 95 prisoners.

At meal time, Yakima inmates walk single-file into a cafeteria, pick up trays and return to their rooms. Feeding all 360 inmates takes 30 minutes.

In Kootenai County, jail staff spends almost two hours feeding more than 160 inmates, individually pushing each tray through openings in cell doors.

Members of the citizens committee marveled at the efficiency and the fact that only five officers are needed to guard the 356 prisoners in Yakima’s jail annex.

“We can accommodate a larger number of inmates with less personnel by using the dormitory-type setting,” Shirley said. “It’s much more effective than the way we have it set up.”

However, Kootenai County couldn’t just build an annex and call it good. Other services, such as the kitchen, property room, laundry and infirmary need expanding as well.

“There’s a lot of facilities (Yakima) didn’t have to duplicate,” said Commissioner Ron Rankin, also a committee member. “We have to expand everything. A lot of the infrastructure will be more expensive on ours.”

No definite costs have been set for a jail expansion in Kootenai County.

Inmates in Yakima also have no television sets, an idea which appealed to Rankin. He said he’d like to see local colleges or high schools offer courses in the jail “so they can do something besides sit there and watch TV all day.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT’S NEXT The next meeting of the Criminal Justice Advisory Committee is 7 p.m. Thursday in the Kootenai County Administration Building.