Original article
County correctional facility faces funding shortfall
The Barnstable County Correctional Facility in Bourne could feel the effects of funding woes as early as next month.
Cape Cod Times /Steve Heaslip
By Patrick Cassidy
STAFF WRITER
April 13, 2008
The number of inmates in Cape Cod's county jail grew at triple the national average rate in 2005 and 2006, according to a group that wants to reduce the number of people incarcerated in the United States.
Nationally, inmate populations in county jails jumped 4.7 percent in 2005 and 2.5 percent in 2006, the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute found in a national analysis. During those same years, the population at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility rose by 14 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively. Since 2006 it has risen another 3.5 percent to roughly 440 inmates today.
One reason for the jump: additional space. The jail in Bourne, opened in 2004 to replace the overcrowded facility in Barnstable, can house 588 inmates. The old jail was built in the 1930s to hold 110 inmates.
Although it appears that earlier fears the inmate population might top even the new jail's capacity in 2008 were unwarranted, Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings and local prosecutors worry that the rise in the inmate population is happening at the same time as a potential budget crunch.
Earlier this month, Leslie Kirwan, Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance, warned the seven sheriffs who do not fall directly under the state's budget that supplemental state funding typically sent at the end of the fiscal year will not be coming this year. For Barnstable County a potential $5 million gap in this year's budget could affect payroll and operations as soon as mid-May, Cummings said last week.
Less money, more prisoners
The squeeze from tight budgets and burgeoning jail populations is a problem across the country, according to the authors of the Justice Policy Institute report.
Jails affect host communities environmentally, financially and legally, according to the report.
Despite a flat crime rate since 2000, the country added 145,000 more people to its jails and built 10 jails a year — including the Cape's new facility.
The reasons range from an overflow of state prisons to a 500 percent increase in immigration violators housed in jails, according to the report. Increases in the number of inmates with mental health problems and the number held pretrial added to jail populations as well.
The impact on smaller jails, such as the Bourne facility, is even more pronounced than on larger jails, one of the report's authors, Amanda Petteruti, said in a telephone interview. "Every county seems to be different," she said.
The purpose of jails has changed and expanded over the years as the country responded "to a variety of social problems through the criminal justice system," Petteruti and her co-author wrote in their report.
For example, higher bail amounts lead to higher pretrial incarceration rates, Petteruti said.
But Barnstable County defies that particular trend. The percentage of inmates who were held pretrial on Cape was about half the national average in 2006, according to data provided by Cummings' office.
"Our courts do a pretty good job of getting people through the system," Cummings said.
And, while the Bourne jail held 31 women last year from a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a New Bedford leather factory, the number of them declined until the arrangement became unfeasible for the jail, Cummings said. The jail charges the federal government $84 a day for immigration violators but if a block of cells is not filled completely, its use for federal inmates can be a burden, he said.
There are a dozen other federal inmates held on the Cape. The U.S. Marshals office pays $70 a day or $490 a week to house them.
Although the area's inmate population leveled off in the past year, any future rise could lead to inmates being released earlier than planned, county officials said this week.
When the old jail faced similar pressures, inmates received more days of "good time" served as part of a court order to ease the population crisis, Cummings said.
"The judges ... knew we were overcrowded," he said. At the time, an inmate would be awarded 12 days of time off the end of their sentence for each month they went without disciplinary problems in the jail, Cummings said.
Once the new jail was built in Bourne and the court order was lifted, inmates received only seven days for each month of good time served, he said.
This, along with the Cape's population, could partially account for the sharp rise in the inmate population, Cummings said. The Cape's population jumped from 186,605 to 222,230 between 1990 and 2000. Since that time it has leveled off.
Meanwhile, criminal complaints filed in district courts on the Cape & Islands were level from 2001 through 2007, according to a database maintained by the Massachusetts courts system.
"It's a nettlesome subject," Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe said about incarceration rates.
Defendants are given ample opportunity to straighten out before they are sent to jail, he said. And the prosecutor disagreed with the argument that there are a large number of people in jail for simple drug crimes such as possession of marijuana.
Most of the people in jail for drug crimes are dealers, he said.
The criminal justice system must offer protection to the public by keeping dangerous criminals off the streets, O'Keefe said.
Still, more could be done once a former inmate re-enters society, he said.
Second Chance Act
In that vein, U.S. President George Bush last week signed the Second Chance Act, a bill designed to provide more opportunity for inmates once they leave prisons and jails.
If the initiative receives the appropriate funding it could be the most unprecedented effort since the 1970s to reduce the number of inmates who return to jail after being released, Petteruti said.
The Justice Policy report recommends electronic monitoring, drug treatment and employment training, among the ways to alleviate the problem of overcrowded jails and the need to construct new jails.
"First we should be looking at the alternatives," Petteruti said.
Barnstable County was able to institute many of these options in its new jail, Cummings said. The programs include drug treatment during and after jail stays, education and work assistance.
"We weren't able to do a lot of these programs that we wanted in the old jail," he said. "That kind of bucks the Justice Policy Institute's complaint about building new jails."
Patrick Cassidy can be reached at pcassidy@capecodonline.com.
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