New jail could be too small, sheriff says

Dutchess County hasn’t yet broken ground for a new jail, but county Sheriff Adrian “Butch” Anderson already is warning the facility under consideration might be too small.

Asked Thursday how plans for the new Dutchess County Law Enforcement and Transition Center were progressing, Anderson said: “We’re going to be overcrowded when this thing opens.”

While that prediction may be “a pessimistic view of things,” it is not completely off the mark, said Deputy County Executive William O’Neill.

“If things were to continue as they are now, and we build the size jail we are contemplating right now, he would be right,” O’Neill said.

The county has not yet decided on a final size for the new jail, O’Neill noted, adding that decision will be made in the next couple of months.

He said that, currently, the county is eyeing a jail with just under 500 general-population cells, plus an additional 35 medical unit beds and another 25 or 30 cells that could be used for double bunking, although the county would need special permission from the state for that.

“That would give us somewhere close to 570,” O’Neill said.

On Tuesday, the 257-bed Dutchess County Jail had an in-

mate population of 485. Although the county received permission from the state to use temporary pods that house about 200 inmates, to help ease overcrowding, 40 Dutchess inmates were being boarded at the Ulster County Jail in Kingston.

Dutchess County has spent the better part of four decades struggling with overcrowding at its jail. When the current jail opened in 1996, it was overcrowded immediately. Over the next decade, the county continued to house inmates, sometimes in excess of 100 a day, in jails in other counties, costing Dutchess tens of millions of dollars and angering the state Commission of Corrections, which oversees the operation of county jails.

In 2013, facing the increasing ire of the state along with a burgeoning budget to house inmates in out-of-county jails, County Executive Marc Molinaro began pushing for the construction of a new Sheriff’s Office and county jail that also would include programs for special-needs communities, such as those with mental health and substance abuse problems.

O’Neill said those programs will be key to helping bring down the daily jail population. “We’re doing a lot of things to lessen the jail numbers,” he said.

But he also said the county plans to step up its effort to encourage the jail to move parole violators — state prison inmates who were released from prison but either committed a new crime or violated the terms of their release — out of the county jail. He said on any given day, parolees make up 10 to 13 percent of the total inmate count.

“We’re going to make the hard case for [moving] parolees,” O’Neill said. “If I had the parolees out of my jail, I’d have no problem. I could probably build a smaller jail.”