Despite reform, North Georgia jails 'busting at the seams'

As political leaders in Atlanta push criminal justice reform, local law enforcement officials have noticed an unintended consequence: crowded jails.

The Georgia Legislature has passed several reform packages since Gov. Nathan Deal, a former prosecutor and judge, took office in 2011 with the goal of sending fewer defendants to prison.

The state's prison population had more than doubled between 1990 and 2011, and criminal justice researchers predicted it would grow another 7 percent by 2017. That growth would be costly for taxpayers - an additional $260 million if officials couldn't stop the swelling.

By and large, Deal's reform aimed to lower the number of nonviolent offenders in prison. He succeeded. From 2009 to 2015, annual prison commitments dropped 16 percent.

But local sheriffs say the story isn't that simple. The number of people incarcerated may not have plummeted so dramatically.

Sheriffs say some of the burden simply shifted from state prisons to local jails. Some defendants given probation will break the rules and be locked up in county jails, at county expense.

In the last three years, warrants for felony probation violations in Catoosa, Murray and Gordon counties have all increased. So has the average daily population of their jails.

"There is no relief in sight," said Murray County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Brian Ingle.

"We're busting at the seams," said Catoosa County Sheriff Gary Sisk.

"All of us in the northwest corner have seemed to experience that," said Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson.

Probation challenges

Statewide tracking of this phenomenon is difficult to measure. Each month, the Georgia Department of Community Affairs reports the population of every county jail. But the report measures just one day of the month. And there are some holes: The population in the Catoosa County jail, for example, appeared to be in the 30s and 40s some months - about 200 inmates shy of the actual figures.

But four Georgia counties that responded to Times Free Press requests for data last week showed an uptick in average daily jail populations from 2015-2017. Catoosa County had the smallest increase, at 12.7 percent. Murray County had the largest, a 33.3 percent bump.

Walker County did not provide information about its average daily populations. However, the sheriff's office did show that more people are in the 242-bed jail this year. In 2015 and 2016, the jail's population was above capacity an average of 88 days a year. Through last week, the figure for 2017 was on pace for 145 days.

Chattooga County Sheriff Mark Schrader did not provide data for his jail. But he has lobbied for years for a new facility. The county is under a federal consent order that dates back to 1984 and restricts the jail population to 47 inmates.

The county consistently holds more inmates. On Thursday, Schrader said the figure sat at 120, forcing him to pay other counties to hold some defendants.

He, too, has noticed more probation violators in recent years. He said some inmates are stacked up, waiting for an open bed at a probation detention center or a substance abuse treatment center.

Some of the legislative reforms aim to push more inmates into places where they can focus on self-improvement, education and addiction recovery. Criminal justice experts in Georgia hope such programs can reduce recidivism.

But the line to get into a program has been long. In 2015, the average wait time for Whitfield County inmates was 104 days. It decreased quite a bit in 2016, but the wait time was still 60 days.

"The heartburn I have is from a management standpoint," Wilson said. "They're sentenced to [a substance abuse treatment center], come to the county jail, and some of them will wait for over a year for a bed to become available. I don't think that's fair to an inmate, to the judicial system, or to taxpayers."

Local Public Defender David Dunn, who sits on the governor's Criminal Justice Reform Council, does not believe the increase in probation revocations is the result of sending fewer people to prisons. He blames a cultural influence, the "tough on crime" political rhetoric that ratcheted up in the 1980s and '90s.

When he was a prosecutor 30 years ago, Dunn said, probation revocations were rare; he saw maybe three or four a month. Now, he said, about half the people in local jails have violated probation.

He said probation officers changed over time, from hoping to help people to viewing themselves as law enforcement. (Georgia has the highest rate of probation in the country, something the reform council is trying to curb.)

But Dunn could not explain why the probation violation rate increased in recent years, when a cultural shift is not so pronounced.

"That's coming either internally from the probation office," he said, "or law enforcement in general."

Drug offenses

Wilson said a second issue also has driven Walker County's jail crowding: drug arrests.

Over the past 12 months, the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Drug Task Force worked 448 cases, Commander Pat Doyle said. That's about 80 cases more than the task force worked last year, and the most in its 30-year history.

Georgia officials worked hard to push methamphetamine out of communities over the past decade. New laws made it more difficult to buy ingredients like pseudoephedrine in bulk. Doyle said agents also took top local meth cooks off the street.

In the early 2000s, DTF agents were finding more than 150 meth labs every year. Over the last 12 months, Doyle said, they found just six labs. And yet investigators believe there is more meth on the street in Northwest Georgia than a decade ago.

As is always the case, Doyle said, the drug trade adapted. Mexican cartels mass-produced ice methamphetamine, a slightly more pure product than what some dealers were cooking behind their trailers. They moved the drug to hubs such as Atlanta, where dealers shipped them up Interstate 75.

"The cartels are business people," Doyle said. "They recognized [the change]. They flooded the market with their brand."

Wilson said addicts continue to fill up his jail, now more than ever.

"[Ice] is easy to conceal," he said. "And it's highly addictive. And relatively cheap, versus a meth lab. You don't have a factor of it blowing up or getting you injured."

Long-term plans

Asked why the Catoosa County jail's population recently has increased, Sisk laughed.

"That's the million-dollar question there," he said. "I don't know. There are so many variables that are involved with it. It's a very complicated issue."

He's noticed an increase in probation revocations and a lot of drug cases. But Sisk said he's concerned even more about the long term. Right now, the jail is around 90 percent full. In 10 years, that won't do.

Catoosa County continues to grow at a fast rate. From 2000-2016, according to U.S. Census figures, the county's population increased 24 percent, third highest in the Times Free Press' publishing area behind Gordon County (29 percent) and Sequatchie County (31 percent).

If growth continues and the crime rate remains steady, the jail will go well above its capacity over the next decade. When he took office in 2013, Sisk commissioned an analysis from the Georgia Sheriff's Association to see what to do about the jail.

The report's authors said expansion will be necessary. By 2030, they project, the jail population consistently will be in the 380-450 range.

This could usher in another era of jail construction. In 2001, Walker County expanded its jail by 96 beds. The next year, Catoosa County opened its new jail. The year after that, Whitfield County followed suit.

But a new jail, or a large expansion, is expensive. During an intergovernmental meeting Monday, Sisk pitched a different idea to Catoosa County commissioners: Build an inmate workhouse, like the one the Bradley County Sheriff's Office opened last month.

For about $3 million, Sisk said, he could house 100 low- and medium-security inmates. They would find local jobs and work during the day, using their earnings to pay court costs and restitution. They would also pocket some of their money.

"That's something we've got to very seriously consider," Sisk told the commissioners.

When the current jail becomes too small, Sisk will have to push inmates to other jails. He's not sure which ones, though.

"Most of the jails in our area are busting at the seams," he said. "That is a concern."

Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.