Metro Pulse/Insights/Knox County Jails

Comment
on this story

by Joe Sullivan

The solution to Knox County's purported jail overcrowding problem isn't to build additional facilities but to reduce the number of inmates are who are being need-lessly incarcerated.

That strongly held view on the part of District Attorney General Randy Nichols is supported by jail statistics reported to the Tennessee Department of Corrections. Of Knox County's jail population totaling 912 as of the latest reporting date, 275 were persons awaiting trial on misdemeanor charges. That number of pre-trial mis-demeanants by far exceeds any other county in the state and compares to 68 in Davidson County where the total jail population is about 3,000.

Moreover, these excesses are a major contributor to the much-publicized recent breeches of the 215 cap on prisoners at the downtown jail. Since the downtown jail represents the only component of Knox County's total detention capacity of 968 that is permitted to hold maximum- security prisoners, one might suppose these breeches are due to a build up in the number of dangerous felons. But in fact the downtown jail population includes 52 pre-trial misdemeanants. This number of minor offenders just about equals the number of vacant beds at the county's much larger detention facility on Maloneyville Road as of the most recent reporting date.

If the Sheriff's Department, which runs the jails, has explanations for any of these anomalies, they are not being communicated to Metro Pulse. Our unreturned phone calls reinforce a pattern of stonewalling the media on the part of Sheriff Tim Hutchison and his deputies. But even if they did respond, their credibility throughout the criminal justice system is so low that many suspect them of trying to manufacture an overcrowding problem in order to get a new jail that the sheriff has long coveted. Is it just coincidence that overcrowding resurfaced as an issue shortly after Hutchison's reelection in August in a closely-contested race in which he managed to downplay his unpopular prior advocacy of building a $60 million new facility?

Nichols, who has spearheaded the opposition to a new jail in the past, is gearing up to do so once again. "We don't have a jail capacity problem. We have a gross mismanagement problem," the district attorney general asserts. The problem starts, he says, with far too many people charged with misdemeanors being jailed when they should get citations to appear in court. Offenses ranging from marijuana possession to shoplifting to passing bad checks should be cited as a rule but "apparently we'd rather haul these people off to jail," Nichols contends.

The problem is compounded once they are in jail by detaining too many of them for too long, Nichols says. Those who can't make bond are entitled to a judicial hearing within ten days of their arrest, but in many cases these arraignment get delayed. "There are a thousand and one reasons why the easiest thing to do is to delay," says Nichols, "and I'll take my share of the responsibility for it. But many of these cases should be disposed of on arraignment date through a guilty plea or dismissal or else a trial date should be set."

The Criminal Justice Section of the Knoxville Bar Association is developing a set of rules aimed at redressing these and other problems. These proposed rules, on which prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys are collaborating, would (1) encourage the use of criminal summons or citations rather than arrests in many misdemeanor cases; and (2) provide for a pre-trial release advocate to act on behalf of those who are jailed prior to their arraignment. Once a set of rules is approved by the bar association, it's contemplated that they would take on the force of the law through judicial adoption.

"It's not part of the sheriff's mission to keep people out of jail or get them out quickly, so we've got to look to the courts to take the lead," says one of the lawyers much involved in formulation of the proposed rules.

Until the overall jail population can be reduced, it would appear that all the sheriff has to do to relieve pressure on the downtown jail is to relocate inmates who don't belong there. Any notion of spending megabucks on jail expansion, whether downtown or at Manloneyville, should be held in abeyance.

If there is a case for building a new jail, it's based more on conditions in the old one than its capacity. By all reports, the downtown jail in the City/County Building is inefficient to operate and hardly fit for human habitation. Its long, dark cell rows require more staffing to keep a watch on prisoners than the pod design at Maloneyville that enables a single jailer to observe many more prisoners in cells surrounding him.

Renovation or replacement of this antiquated facility should be County Commission's point of departure in evaluating jail needs. The construction of an additional pod at Maloneyville that several commissioners reportedly favor doesn't appear responsive to these needs unless Commission is prepared to renege on a previous pledge not to place maximum security prisoners at the Northeast Knox County detention facility.