Sheriffs’ reply to governor’s inmate transfer plan: ‘We’re full’
In the three weeks since Gov. Doug Ducey announced plans to shut down the Florence state prison, his staff has characterized a proposal to transfer certain inmates to local jails as something sought by counties.
His office recently pointed to three letters from Arizona Sheriffs Association members asking for transfers from overcrowded or otherwise inadequate correctional facilities, for instance, saying “many” sheriffs offices had “expressed interest in housing inmates.”
There’s one problem, though: The letters cited by Ducey’s office were
sent in 2015.
And many counties’ jails don’t look like they did five years ago, according to the officials who run them.
“Our capacity right now wouldn’t allow us to take anybody,” said Lt. Dennis Warren of the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office, one of the agencies that requested state transfers in 2015. “We’re full.”
At least seven other counties had similar concerns. “The jail is already overcrowded,” Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Dwight D’Evelyn said. “We have no plans to accept prisoners.”
Thad Smith, chief deputy for the Cochise County Sheriff ’s Office, said Cochise doesn’t have “any real capacity to accept a lot more people.”
Only one of the nine counties that responded to The Arizona Republic’s inquiries said its jail had room for transfers. But Lauren Reimer, a spokeswoman for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office there, said the county could not accept any additional inmates without hiring “dozens of new detention officers.”
She said there were therefore “no immediate plans to take in any inmates from DOC (the Arizona Department of Corrections,” but the county was open to discussing its options.
“Sheriffs as a whole were kind of taken aback when the prison closure was advertised by the governor, because there had been no interaction with him or his staff about it,” said Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot, a past president of the state Sheriffs Association.
“Our last letter was in 2015. All the sheriffs were up there the day of the (governor’s State of the State and we’re all looking at each other like, ‘Have you talked to anybody?’ So it’s been kind of a, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ ”
“The bottom line is, we’re detention centers. We deal with short-term. So there’s a number of different things we’re going to have to look at before we’d even entertain this idea.”
Jails and prisons ‘vastly different’
Analyzing a jail’s capacity involves more than counting empty beds.
It requires a review of each offender’s needs and risk level, as well as detailed staffing and infrastructure assessments.
“You tend to run out of usable beds long before you run out of actual beds, because not everybody can just be housed together,” said Capt. Don Bischoff, jail commander for Mohave County.
“Especially in the spring through the late fall, we can be running at 80 to 85% capacity,” he said. “And what that does from a classification standpoint is make it difficult to appropriately house the inmates we already have.”
Mohave also tries to reserve beds for local offenders, Bischoff said, and wouldn’t be able to do so if it accepted “any substantial amount of DOC inmates.”
“We will, as a courtesy, hold some inmates or prisoners for other jurisdictions, but that’s usually short-term and in very low numbers,” he said.
Facilities that house state prisoners also are expected to offer treatment and other types of rehabilitation programs — resources local detention centers typically don’t have.
“The MCSO jail system is specifically designed and capable of holding pre-trial detainees, as well as those sentenced for less than a year into county custody,” Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Calbert
Gillett said.
“Although many defendants end up in state prisons from county jails, requirements relating to medical care, programming, recreation and security are vastly different between the two.”
Gillett said the current layout of Maricopa County jails “is based on population projections and requirements of county jail inmates,” and “adding additional population groups to the system would require extensive resources and planning.”
Who would foot the bill?
It wasn’t immediately clear how much financial help jails that agree to accept state prisoners would receive.
A spokesman for the governor said only that his office was “working to ensure (counties) are provided this option as we move forward with this plan,” and that it would “continue to prioritize housing inmates in a safe, rehabilitative environment.”
The Governor’s Office previously indicated private prisons could also receive some state inmates as a result of the Florence closure but could not say how many, making it difficult to estimate how much state funding for-profit prisons might get.
Private facilities generally do not accept offenders who require heightened supervision, extensive medical treatment or other expensive resources.
Coconino County Jail Cmdr. Matt Figueroa said he understood jails that agreed to take state prisoners would get a “nominal amount” from the state. He said that funding “would nowhere offset the cost to potentially having to retrofit the jail facility to be able to allow for and give the same type of amenities that the prisoners get while incarcerated in (state prisons).”
“At this point, we don’t have the capacity to house DOC inmates, nor were we one of the counties that was looking for this to possibly happen,” he said.
Wilmot, the Yuma County sheriff, said he hoped to get additional information at regional meetings between sheriffs and corrections officials in the coming weeks. As of Thursday, state officials had begun contacting sheriffs to discuss transfer possibilities, he said.
“You have to look at the current populations that you have in your jails and ask: Do you have the staffing? What would the other operational impacts be?” Wilmot said.
“The bottom line is, we’re detention centers. We deal with short-term. So there’s a number of different things we’re going to have to look at before we’d even entertain this idea.”