The county executive wants something, but he's not ready to say what. The D.A. wants less than whatever it is. And the sheriff's not saying a word. As Knox County's jail debate enters its second decade, the questions remain the same: What do we need in the way of a jail, and why?
by Mike Gibson
Knoxville sophisticates may well look down their collective nasal organ at Sevierville, our alternately tacky and bucolic sister city just up Interstate 40, but there's one area in particular (other than aging country music stars per capita) where our smaller neighbor to the east far exceeds us—in the overall modernity, efficiency, and utility of its county jail.
Built in 1991, the Sevier County Jail, also the home of the Sevier County Sheriff's Department, is a modern stone fortress, with buffed white tile floors, unsullied, peach-colored brick walls, and fearsomely impenetrable blue steel doors that swing open only upon staffers' entry of the proper electronic codes. Its prisoners are housed in tidy, space efficient "pods"—airy and readily viewable group recreation room/living areas overlooked on one side by a bi-level cluster of individual cell pods, and on the other by a room of SCSD staffers equipped with a cybernetic array of computerized controls and surveillance apparati. This modern approach to the age-old quandary of how to house society's disruptive rebels and rule-breakers is, at least within the limited context of correctional design, safe, humane and cost-efficient.
By contrast, a visit to the Knox County Jail, shoveled into several floors of downtown's City County Building since 1979, is like watching an old prison flick. Its grimy layers fraught with grim, interminable rows of black-barred iron cells, the jail requires more staff and creates a more hazardous living/working environment than its newer, sleeker, more compactly organized counterpart.
The Sevier County Jail offers a lucid portrait of a modern jail facility—an idea Knox County officials have cussed, discussed, and fussed about for more than a decade now. It also provides a very accessible portrait, in contrast to its Knox counterpart. After years of lobbying for a new jail, the Knox County Sheriff's Department has recently become uncooperative in providing either access to facilities or commentary on the larger issues therein.
Such avoidance is telling. Sparked by a federal court ruling more than 10 years ago, the public debate over if, when, where, and how to build a new jail, prisoner intake center, and perhaps additional justice-related facilities has been a contentious one, marked by many convoluted turns of events. The latest plan, apparently calling for additions and renovations to existing City County Building facilities, is now due in October (after being pushed back several times), and County Executive Tommy Schumpert is no more anxious to discuss the pending proposal than his colleagues in the Sheriff's Department. "The details on location, cost, and scope haven't come together as quickly as we'd hoped," says Schumpert. "And I don't want to give out information piecemeal."
Consultants on the county project, though more forthcoming about the physical plans, are likewise mum on financial details. And while those who are skeptical of the need for more jail space are more than willing to share their often-strident opinions, their arguments are colored by various personal and professional agendas.
District Attorney General Randy Nichols, a Democrat and no political friend of Sheriff Tim Hutchison, may be seeking to cast himself as a cost-cutter when election time comes. Local defense lawyers, suspicious of Hutchison to start with, question the need for grand designs. Schumpert and his consultant, Bob Goble, claim to be driven mostly by statistical planning and economic efficiency. And Hutchison himself—well, Hutchison's not talking.
All of which leaves the general public—i.e., the Knox County taxpayer—to wrestle with a few fundamental queries: Do we need new jail space? If so, where will we put it, and how much should it cost?
In Jan. 25, 1989, U.S. District Court Judge James Jarvis ruled in Carver vs. Knox County that the conditions at the county jail and intake center were unconstitutional, in violation of the Eighth Amendment's proscription of cruel and unusual punishment. The case was a class action brought on behalf of jail inmates, and Jarvis' opinion chronicled a host of correctional ailments—overcrowding, inadequate supplies, lack of exercise and recreational opportunities, incidents of inmate violence, an overabundance of state prisoners awaiting transfer, etc.
In the years that followed, a few relevant changes were effected, including the 1994 construction of a county detention facility off Maloneyville Road in East Knox County, a 676-bed structure built so that its capacity could eventually exceed 1,400. But promises to Maloneyville residents prevented authorities from using the facility to house maximum security inmates (a malleable term, defined by individual sheriffs' departments based on a prisoner's offense and behavior), and other efforts to dam the jail overflow were makeshift propositions. Among them was a temporary jail facility, prefabricated metal buildings erected across from the detention center, allowing 120 additional beds. "They spent several years trying to band-aid the problem," says Bob Goble of Carter Goble Associates.
County officials brought in Goble four years ago; his South Carolina firm specializes in justice facility planning. His research suggested that rising crime rates, proximity considerations, and economies of scale dictated consolidation of justice-related facilities. The resulting plan called for a downtown jail-intake facility that would eventually play host to all local justice-related offices—courts, police, etc. The county purchased a huge tract of land on State Street downtown, and was on the brink of construction.
But the planned palatial justice center—facetiously dubbed the "Taj Mah Tim" by critics, in reference to Hutchison—never saw the light of day, effectively squelched by an admixture of political infighting, plummeting crime rates, downtowners' opposition, and a daunting price tag ($90 million).
The first plan died on the vine, but not the debate that spurred it. Still looming over the heads of officials was the Jarvis mandate, reaffirmed in a 1997 hearing. In January of this year, Schumpert called Carter Goble in for new forecasts, followed by development consultant Brian Gracey to aid in fashioning a new proposal. Though the executive's office is unwilling to comment until the expected October revelation of new plans, Goble and Gracey are at some liberty to discuss their recommendations.
"What we found was basically what Mr. Schumpert had guessed," Goble reports. "Trends in adult crime were going down; arrests were going down; jail detainees were down. The essence of the findings was that there is no need in the near future for new court buildings, but still some need for an expanded jail and intake facility."
Carter Goble's newest report banks on a number of significant discrepancies: the 1996 plan forecasts that the jail system would require some 1,400 total beds by the year 2005; the latest projections predict a need for scarcely 1,100.
And whereas the '96 projections showed that 2005 would see need for four additional courtrooms, the latest findings call for only one more in the next five years, and only two more by 2015.
As a result, the revised master concept calls for construction of a new six-story building on the north side of Hill Avenue—as opposed to the State Street site originally purchased for a justice center—with a connector to the City County Building second floor and the current jail. The existing City County Building jail space would be retrofitted to accommodate updated facilities, and the intake center would be moved from its present Maloneyville home to the downtown location. In less than three years, the revisions would increase downtown jail capacity from its current level of 215 beds to around 300.
"Three hundred beds—that's a lot less than we originally anticipated," says Gracey, noting that the 1996 justice center plan called for nearly 500.
(Goble's latest plan would also move the Sheriff's Department's downtown headquarters to the Maloneyville detention center and liberate additional City County Building space that may one day be used for courtrooms. "We believe it's still possible to keep the justice center concept intact," Goble says. "The '96 findings still bear out that from a taxpayer standpoint, it pays to have courts and detention facilities together.")
What these renovations would cost is still uncertain, but Schumpert's preliminary estimates place the sum at $55 million to $60 million. And to some critics, that figure is too steep. "We're not in crisis," says Nichols, an early proponent of the justice center who says his opinion was swayed by reductions in the growth of crime.
And to some extent, statistics bear out his contention. A recent jail summary report from the Tennessee Department of Corrections, derived from Sheriff's Department figures, attests that Knox County's average total jail occupancy rate fell from 82 percent in 1998 to 81 percent in '99 to less than 70 percent through the summer of 2000. However, a disproportionate number of occupied beds fell in the jail's vital City County Building location (as much as a 96 percent occupancy rate in June of 2000), where the most serious criminal offenders are housed.
But observers point out that anti-jail sentiments are easily reconciled with certain political realities: Hutchison's popularity is on the wane, his allies few, and he faces re-election in 2002. D.A. special counsel John Gill goes so far as to suggest that "(the jail) is what the next sheriff's race ought to be all about."
Likewise, Nichols' words bear the impress of skepticism, reproach, even disdain when he states, emphatically, "I don't know what the sheriff's position is. I know what it was: the 472-bed facility on State Street. Since then, I haven't heard one way or the other."
And while Nichols doesn't dismiss a new construction project out of hand, he echoes Gill in suggesting a countywide referendum on a new jail in 2002—the year his seat is also up for re-election. "If the pro-jail people win, I'll go out there and help them lay some block," he says with affable folksiness.
"The Jarvis ruling, which set off this whole mess, has been seriously misrepresented," says Nichols. "At the time, we had 72 drunks in a 12-man drunk tank, and the judge said, 'Don't do that no more.' Since then, we've built a new detention center. It's got 676 beds, and can be expanded to 1,500. It's not like we've been cavalier."
Many prominent local defense attorneys share Nichols' premise, if not his motivation. (Lawyers such as demonstrative defense attorney Herb Moncier have been gravely at odds with Hutchison recently, as when the sheriff placed draconian restrictions on lawyer-client interaction at the jail last year.)
"My position is three-fold," avers well-known local defense attorney Greg Isaacs. "'Why?' 'Why?' and, 'Why?' The Maloneyville facility was built with the promise that we could expand it if needed, so we wouldn't have to do this again.
"If you read between the lines: if you're a politician and you expand, you increase your power base," Isaacs says, in scarcely veiled reference to Hutchison. "Those facilities are not overcrowded, period."
Attorney Don Bosch exhibits more diplomacy, if only in marginal increments. "We do need a renovated downtown facility and possibly expansion or modification of space for the sheriff's office," Bosch says. "But I think we can accomplish exactly what this community needs with some space renovation and a $15 to $20 million budget."
But Goble says arguments that take as their focus the Jarvis ruling, political vendettas, or even immediate space considerations, are myopic, ill-considered, even evasive. Additions to the Maloneyville detention facility are unsuitable for certain space requirements because of promises to residents that maximum security inmates would not be housed in the area. (Though Goble does add, at one juncture of a conversation with a reporter, that "You've got a great facility out there on Maloneyville; you're just not using it for all it's capable of. People don't like hearing me say that.")
And while the Jarvis decision is a significant landmark in the jail debate, Goble posits that the long-term savings afforded by a properly-designed jail and intake center would vastly outstrip the immediate costs of construction. "Over a building life cycle of 20 to 30 years, capital expenses constitute only about 10 percent of total costs," Goble says. "The other 90 percent is operating costs. And our 20 and 30-year costs projections show significant savings [with a new jail].
"When I first came here in 1996, the need for a new jail was the fundamental problem I saw, from day one."
What are the differences between old-school and new-wave correctional design? According to consultant Brian Gracey, the old style of "indirect supervision" facilities is typified by the Knox County Jail; long corridors of steel cell housing, with row upon row of vertical bars and intermittent surveillance by a large number of staff.
"Direct supervision" jailhouses, such as the local detention facility or the jail built in Sevier County in 1991, are comprised of a number of large housing pods. Each pod consists of a spacious dayroom, where inmates eat and spend most of their day, plus two levels of individual cells separated by mezzanines, each cell secured by steel doors with glass panels. The entire pod—usually 24 to 48 cells—is visible both to a guard or staff member inside the pod, and to another staffer stationed overhead in a remote central control room, complete with video surveillance.
Additional amenities, such as private cells for attorney visits and special classrooms, are located adjacent to the pod. "The concept is to bring services to the inmates rather than bringing inmates to the services," Gracey says.
"It's not just a design; it's a whole system of management," says Goble. "It's a responsibility model, wherein inmates learn that they will quickly be held responsible for their behavior. They tend to be more compliant because they know there's little they can get away with without losing privileges or being placed in a lock-down unit.
"What you had at the old jail, particularly at the time of the Jarvis/Carver ruling, was a combination of overcrowding and substandard conditions of confinement. When you overfill a facility that doesn't meet modern standards, you're going to have a problem."
Goble says the direct supervision model requires fewer staff members, as a single dayroom may be supervised by one officer. And the ease of surveillance makes for a safer facility, for staff members and inmates alike. "There are additional issues to be addressed (through renovations) as well," Goble continues. "The lack of recreational space in the old jail, the lack of natural light..."
Again, jail doubters are skeptical. "I haven't talked to Mr. Goble lately," says Nichols. "But back in '96, he made certain projections. We can look back now and tell whether he missed the first time. And he did miss—substantially."
"I have a lot of confidence in Bob," allows D.A. special counsel John Gill. "But remember, he can't afford to under-predict. He has to work off certain assumptions. Earlier in the '90's, it was this hysteria that there was going to be a massive crime wave."
While the need for bed space remains a wide-open question, few dispute the convenience and utility of moving the intake center back downtown—alleviating transport time and expense for the Knoxville Police Department and the Sheriff's Department alike. Some officials believe Hutchison's earlier removal of intake to Maloneyville, 13 miles from downtown, smacked of petulance and politics rather than need.
The one element glaringly absent from all of the current jail discourse is tangible input from the Knox County Sheriff's Department. At the outset, Hutchison was a stubborn and opinionated advocate of the first-proposed 472-bed facility (replete with intake and new KCSD headquarters.)
Now, some say the sheriff is still understandably sore, politically cautious in the aftermath of defeat—of the State Street proposal he so fervently championed, and of his direct supervision of its construction. Chief Deputy Dwight Van de Vate has spoken bitterly of jail skeptics such as Nichols and Moncier, noting on one occasion that, "(I) can't adequately convey (their) disregard for the truth. Herb, in particular, doesn't know what the hell he's talking about."
Observers also note, however, that Hutchison has done little to help himself in his quest for a larger kingdom, alienating many with his tight-lipped micro-management of jailhouse and media affairs, with his ongoing feuds with rival public officials, with his use of a former inmate drop-off sally port adjacent to City County as a parking area for KCSD officials. "It's his own private parking garage," says one attorney, a charge Van de Vate dismisses as "an outright lie."
"I think the sheriff wants his new facility as another monument to his administration," says another local lawyer, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "And I think people like Tommy (Schumpert) got tired and stopped resisting."
In recent months, Hutchison has receded, tortoise-like, into an impenetrable shell of sour administrative taciturnity. "We will staff and operate whatever the county legislative body sees fit to build," maintains Van de Vate, adding, with a dismissive testiness that belies his assertion of neutrality, "The climate of hysteria has simply been out of control. The opponents of the project seem to feel absolutely no obligation to honor the truth. How can you make good public policy in an environment like that?"
The future of Knox County correctional facilities: It's not a problem for timorous intellects or political naifs. How much (if any) new jail space is necessary? Would it occupy green space on Hill Avenue, new Maloneyville detention wings, or parts unknown? Would it cost $60 million? $15 million? Another sum altogether, derived through some arcane bureaucratic math? Such are the conundrums, the densely fortified soup of options for new jail and justice facilities that will confront county officials in October, and perhaps the voting public somewhere down the road.
Says Goble, one of the few principals with a degree of removal from the fray, "I think our statistical analysis is solid and objective. There is going to be growth in crime, new jail space needs, but not nearly as much as we once believed. You can see the same trends in national statistics. That's how I would respond to those who say there's going to be high growth, and that's how I would respond to those who say there's going to be no growth."
September 21, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 38
© 2000 Metro Pulse
| 
