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WICHITA — Sedgwick County should be able to get by without adding on to its jail for at least two years, County Manager William Buchanan said Wednesday.
Just a few years ago, the county was ready to turn dirt to build more space for people accused and convicted of crimes.
But alternative programs such as drug and mental health courts are working, and Buchanan told commissioners that the downtown jail should be OK for the “foreseeable future.”
Sheriff Robert Hinshaw is a little more cautious about that, noting that the number of people in jail is an ever- moving target.
Asked later to give a more specific time frame, Buchanan said the county wasn’t planning to build a new facility or add on to the downtown jail for the next 18 months to two years.
“If we can continue with these kinds of programs and move toward other programs like a work center, the possibility exists that we will not need a new jail. It’s currently not on our own horizon,” Buchanan said.
“The sheriff will tell you he’s not nearly as optimistic as I am. At this point, we’re in a way better position than three or four years ago.”
Just five years ago, commissioners voted to raise the mill levy by 2.5 mills to pay for more beds at the jail. That raised property taxes on a $100,000 home by $28.75 a year. Then in 2008, the county backed off an expansion and passed a budget for the next year that lowered the mill levy. The current mill levy is 29.356 mills, slightly above the 28.75 mills in 2006.
Although jail crowding is not in the “crisis state” that it was a few years ago, Buchanan said, the county has set aside land at Furley to use when a new jail or work release center is needed to manage the jail’s population.
The city of Wichita late last year gave the county land at Furley in the northeastern part of the county to offset some of the money it owed the county in jail fees.
In 2008, the county began charging a $2.09 hourly fee to cities that booked defendants into jail on municipal charges. The goal was to get cities to think twice about whether someone really needed to go to jail.
“We can’t afford any longer to put people in jail that we’re just mad at,” Buchanan told commissioners Wednesday. “We can’t afford that. Who was being punished when we were doing that? It was the taxpayers.”
The average daily population in the jail last month was 1,512, compared with 1,636 in October 2010, Buchanan said. Commissioners said they were glad to see the downward trend.
Bookings and releases are also down, as is the amount of time people are spending in jail.
“This is perhaps the new reality,” Buchanan said. “We will have to watch these trends for a while.”
Alternative programs such as mental health court and drug court give people an opportunity to straighten their lives out, Buchanan said. Both programs work intensely with people convicted of crimes to get them help for underlying problems such as drug addiction, alcoholism or a mental illness.
“It’s easy to say we’re going to mandate sentences. That’s easy to do when you’re sitting in Topeka 120 miles away when on the ground here there’s real problems and real issues,” Buchanan said. “The tough-on-crime stance doesn’t seem to work.”
Hinshaw said high numbers at the jail a few years ago “provided the motivation to start investing in alternative methods. Now rather than saying we need it now, eventually we will have to plan for it.”
Although jail numbers are down, “that end game is not a fixed point,” Hinshaw said in an interview later Wednesday. “It’s a moving target. As the laws change, as our community changes, as it grows, we have to constantly monitor that. To say we won’t have to (build a new jail), that is raising the scepter of false hope.”
Hinshaw said the solution is a mix of alternative programs and more beds.
The jail’s population on Wednesday was 1,477, records show.
“The numbers look really good – 1,400-something versus 1,600 in 2009,” Hinshaw said. “But keep in mind that our jail only holds a little over 1,000 inmates. We have 1,400 people. We have 260 people scattered across the state” at other jails.
