February 21, 2023
By: Dwayne Page
The DeKalb County Jail will again be on the minds of the County Commissioners this week.
Members of the Commission, who make up a special jail committee along with County Mayor Matt Adcock, will meet with Sheriff Patrick Ray as a committee to again discuss existing problems related to the physical plant of the jail and what the Tennessee Corrections Institute (TCI) expects of the county in meeting standards for continued jail certification. The meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Wednesday, February 22 on the top floor of the veterans building downtown after which the county commissioners will be taken on a tour of the jail to observe some of the deficiencies for themselves.
Last month, Bob Bass, Deputy Director of the Tennessee Corrections Institute (TCI) along with Jim Hart, Jail Consultant and Field Manager of the County Technical Assistance Service (CTAS) met for the first time with the new County Mayor and County Commission along with the Sheriff to explain how TCI views the current condition of the DeKalb County Jail and Annex and the requirements for correcting structural deficiencies which may at some point in the future require a new building program.
“The particular standards you are in trouble with are physical plant. How the jail was built. It has nothing to do with what the sheriff’s department has done or the staff when it comes to operation. You just don’t meet TCI standards in some areas,” Bass said.
The oldest building, which has been in operation since 1959 and houses prisoners in its basement, currently poses the greatest concern. Eventually, Bass said the county will no longer be able to house inmates in the basement and that recommendation by TCI may come as early as the next inspection cycle this spring.
“Your jail is in trouble because of the housing units. You are housing people in the basement with twenty beds which don’t meet standards and you have some makeshift cells down there and when they are no longer in use which may occur after our next inspection cycle that will bring your total bed count down to around 85 which will probably put you immediately over (capacity),” said Bass.
“Your population is growing and as your community grows, chances are you will need a bigger jail. Of course, any given day you could be overcrowded for various reasons. In 2018, our inspection showed you had 90 inmates (total in Jail and Annex). In 2019 there were 107. After COVID you were back up to 77 inmates in 2021 and 99 in 2022 with 102 beds total capacity for 78 males and 24 females, ” said Bass.
Bass suggested last month that the county commission develop a master plan.
“A master plan would allow us to set up those steps to identify where you want to be six months from now, finding out cost factors and things like that, finding the property to put it (building project) on and all along the way the county commission could vote to either move forward or stop. There is no specific time limit. It takes time to get these things done. You could be in a plan of action three years. If you made a decision to build a jail tonight just in the design phase alone it would be a year so that plan of action is a good thing to have and as long as you have it and show measurable progress, we are not going to take away your certification,” said Bass.
Although jails in Tennessee may operate without state certification Bass said he doesn’t recommend it because of the risk of liability and lawsuits against the county.
The mission of TCI and CTAS is mostly advisory. Its up to the county commission to decide on a specific course of action, whether it be future construction of a new jail or criminal justice center, or expansion of the existing facility. A decision of that kind is not expected to happen anytime soon. Months of meetings and planning have to go into any project under consideration. “The only role we (TCI) play in this is the educational part of it. We are not here to say you have to do this or that. TCI oversees compliance. We are not regulatory. It just behooves a county to be in compliance to ensure that you are running a constitutionally correct jail so that if you have to go to court, we can go to court with you. We (TCI) certify the officers’ training and certify the jail to make sure it follows certain guidelines to standards,” Bass continued.