Kelley Cradduck, effectively Benton County’s sheriff-elect, is appropriately pondering the way the county jail handles prisoners with mental health issues.
Cradduck recently won the Republican nomination for sheriff and faces no general election opposition.
He knows he will face serious challenges administering the jail and is thinking through his options.
“When you house people at a jail, you’re responsible for them,” he said recently as he refl ected on the May 3 jail death of Faith Denise Whitcomb, a Benton County inmate.
Jail management is a huge challenge for any sheriff. Not only are there felons and misdemeanants in a jail population, there are also people who have been convicted of nothing at all.
Some, like Whitcomb, suffer from mental illness and have been found unfi t for trial and ordered into the care of the Arkansas State Hospital.
Whatever an inmate’s situation or condition, the sheriff accepts responsibility - on behalf of all of the public - for all of them while in the jail.
Cradduck’s May 22election came shortly after Whitcomb died in her jail cell of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer.
She died on current Sheriff Keith Ferguson’s oftcial watch, but Cradduck will be taking over in January.
“It’s certainly a tragic incident, but we need to look at it as an opportunity to make changes to ensure this situation doesn’t happen again,” Cradduck said recently.
What made Whitcomb’s jail death particularly tragic was the fact she sat alone in a cell for 178 days after she was found unfi t for trial on drug-related charges.
She was awaiting transfer to the Arkansas State Hospital, where her mental health and possibly her physical health might have been better treated.
The state, which has left numerous mental patients in jails when space was unavailable in the state hospital, clearly failed Whitcomb.
Sheriff Ferguson hassaid his jail staff did all they could for the woman considering her cancer was undiagnosed.
Whitcomb, arrested in July 2011, may indeed have come to jail with pancreatic cancer.
Nevertheless, as the months went by, she grew increasingly ill while in county custody.
She repeatedly saw a jail nurse and a doctor and received Tylenol and Pepto-Bismol to treat her pain.
The cancer had spread to other organs, but no one knew that.
Had Whitcomb not been in jail, she might have died just as soon. But she was in jail and, therefore, she was the public’s responsibility.
Rightly, her death has caused Cradduck and some others in the county to consider changes that may help some future inmate similarly held.
The idea Cradduck is considering involves converting all or part of a barracks building at the jail to house prisoners with mental conditions.
He has in mind to have them watched by jailers and medical staff trained to handle and identify mental health issues and provide specialized supervision or care.
That’s an ambitious, and potentially quite costly, undertaking.
Still, it is worthy of examination as Cradduck plans his administration of the jail and sheriff ’s oft ce.
For the record, the barracks were built for nonviolent prisoners at a time when Ferguson needed to ease overcrowding in regular jail cells.
Designed to hold 144 prisoners, the barracks were a less costly alternative to an enlarged jail.
They were only completed last year but were intended to reserve the regular jail space for worse off enders.
Recently, largely because of the implementation of new statewide sentencing guidelines, the county jail is holding fewer prisonbound inmates or holding them for shorter times.
That, plus changes in probation and parole practices, has brought an overall reduction in jail population and the opportunity to redefi ne jail policies.
This is the sort of review that happens with any change in sheriff s, but Whitcomb’s unfortunate death while in Benton County’s custody certainly provided new impetus for Cradduck as he plans his administration.
BRENDA BLAGG IS A COLUMNIST FOR NWA MEDIA.
Opinion, Pages 12 on 06/24/2012