The Pulaski County jail is set to close again.
Just 21 days after reopening the facility to all offenders, Pulaski County Sheriff Doc Holladay said Monday that he will close the jail again at noon today to people arrested for minor, nonviolent offenses.
The reasons, Holladay said, are the same ones that prompted him to put restrictions on new bookings April 29, restrictions that lasted about six weeks: overcrowding caused by a backlog of state inmates in his jail.
"With the short week, the long holiday weekend coming up, it seemed pretty clear that unless we got control of this population that we would be well over 1,300 and perhaps pushing 1,400 by next Monday after the holiday," Holladay said. "We can't afford to do that. This population, as it continues to grow, we have to maintain some control for the welfare of our employees, inmates and budget."
As of Monday morning, state prisons held 14,558 inmates, 764 over capacity, according to prison records.
With no space in the prisons after an increase in commitments because of the implementation of stricter parole and probation standards last summer, more state inmates are waiting in jails like Holladay's.
When Holladay reopened the jail June 9, nearly 500 of his 1,126 inmates were state prisoners.
On Monday, with 1,281 inmates in the county jail, which is funded to hold 1,210, Holladay still had 467 state inmates being supervised, fed and medically treated with county dollars.
Holladay's announcement Monday came only hours before the start of a special session of the state legislature, one in which lawmakers are expected to allocate an additional $6.3 million to help open up about 600 beds at state prisons, as well as at the Pulaski County work center.
At the beginning of June, the Arkansas Sheriffs' Association asked the governor to call a special session to address a backlog of state prisoners left to wait in county jails.
The backlog, which was at 2,369 Monday, according to state prison officials, has hovered well above 2,000 all of June. Sheriffs in the state want to bring that number down to no higher than 1,600.
Sheriff's association director Ronnie Baldwin said that although the Pulaski County jail is the only one to close due to the growing backlog, all jails are feeling the strain.
Baldwin said he is "grateful" that Gov. Mike Beebe and legislators listened to the frustrated calls for aid from county sheriffs, but said that the proposed money will only go so far.
"We think it's a good start," Baldwin said. "Certainly that's not gonna be a cure-all, but it's certainly a very, very good step in the right direction."
Shea Wilson, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Correction, said that her agency has been able to bring the backlog down from as high as 2,714 in late May through routine use of the Board of Correction's Emergency Powers Act, which lets people set for parole out an additional 90 days before their scheduled releases.
But even with that, the beds keep filling up.
Once additional state funding is available, the first beds to be filled will be at the Northwest Arkansas work-release center in Springdale, which will take 68 new inmates, Wilson said.
After that, prison officials will work to coordinate and staff 124 beds at the Tucker unit in Jefferson County, 100 at the McPherson facility outside of Newport and about 72 beds at the Ouachita River facility outside Malvern.
The remaining 246 beds will be at the Pulaski County work center, although Wilson didn't know how quickly prison officials could fill the newly available spaces.
Holladay is also unclear on a timeline and said he doesn't know when he'll reopen the jail, and if he does, if he'll shut it down again.
While a final solution seems far off to Holladay, the budget realities his administration is grappling with are very much near.
Budgeted for $456,137 for medicine for jail prisoners, he's already spent more than half of that at $290,973.
General medical, dental and other health services have cost the county an additional $871,844.57, according to county figures. The annual budget for those services is $1.5 million.
The costs of overtime are also hitting county coffers.
Only halfway through the year, the jail has paid out $343,706 of its $589,763 overtime budget.
Other costs, such as food, could also catch up, according to Holladay.
Beyond the costs, there are the worries about the safety of jail staff, and the safety of inmates, should the numbers, and the stresses they bring, remain high, the sheriff said.
For prison officials, the long-term solution, according to Wilson, involves a new 1,000-bed prison.
Wilson said the project is early in the planning phases and one that could cost anywhere from $85 million to $100 million and take up to five years to finish.
With a new prison too far down the road, Holladay said that the increase in funding for housing state inmates will be a huge help, but it doesn't go far enough.
The state reimburses county jails $28 a day per state inmate held, though the state's association of counties estimated that the real daily cost to house an inmate is twice that.
"We're fighting this battle [with crowding] everyday and we'll continue to fight it. But these things that are happening are beyond our control," Holladay said. "So what's being done right now is sort of closing some of the holes. But there are still other holes in the dike. We're patching a few but the dike is still leaking."
Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said that for now, the funding increases being discussed by legislators today is about all the governor can do.
"There is not a whole lot more unilaterally we can do," DeCample said. "Especially since this money will fill every bed we asked [prison officials] to find."
The issue will come up again, Baldwin said, but with a new governor and new legislators at the next session, but it's unclear what solutions, if any, will be presented.
"We'll have to wait and see," Baldwin said.
Metro on 07/01/2014