Sullivan Jail Time Becoming ‘By Reservation Only’

It’s commonplace for a hotel to require advance reservations for guests, but the Sullivan County jail has been forced into that position lately because of overcrowding.

“Allowing some DUI defendants to make reservations, for lack of a better term, has helped ease the burden,” Sheriff Keith Carr said Thursday. ‘”Had the judges not been so considerate in doing this, we’d be in a terrible dilemma.”

The “terrible delimma” is having a jail complex that is designed to hold 317 prisoners but is at times required, particularly on some weekends, to accommodate up to 380.

Carr said he and his staff are housing prisoners every way they know how, getting as many prisoners into the 3 1/2-year-old jail and the neighboring jail annex as possible without violating federal court orders mandating that prisoners be classified by their offenses.

References to the facility as simply a ‘‘jail’’ are few.

“We are running a mini-prison,” said Carr.

County Executive John McKamey described the jail as a “regional prison,” but said there are no plans for the county to create space for more prisoners.

“It’s not fair to us, the taxpayers, to build on more and more and hire more and more people to run a regional prison,” he said.

But Carr, mindful of. past lawsuits against the county’s previous jail due to overcrowding and lack of prisoner classification, said he has put McKamey and County Attorney John McLellan III on notice about conditions so that a contingency plan can be developed.

“The state is under a mandate to close the state prison (in Nashville), and the new prison in Mountain City is full,” he said. “The state only took a few of their prisoners out of our jail last month. Who knows when they are going to take more of them?”

Of the 333 prisoners at the jail Thursday, 110 were state prisoners being held by the county because the state prison system, like the jail, is overcrowded. Another 55-60 were pretrial felony detainees — accused felons awaiting trial — that Carr maintains are the state’s responsibility, not his.

“So about 175 of the people we are keeping are not ours,” he said.

The county is paid $26 per state prisoner per day, but had planned on cutting off its state prisoner housing program this year. Carr said that is no longer a practical expectation.

“The state isn’t going to suddenly take 175 prisoners, so while we may say we’re not going to house them, we have no choice,” he said. “The state can put a cap on its prison population, but if a judge here sentences someone to jail, we have to take them.”

In many misdemeanor cases — mostly first-offense drunk driving cases — Sessions Court judges are scheduling prisoners to report to jail a week or more after their conviction.

Judge Steve Jones said the arrangement is being forced on the courts by the state’s economics.

“The jail is full of people serving long, mandatory sentences, and I don’t see any break in it. So we have been forced to use deferred sentences,” he said. “‘We, as judges, don’t want to use deferred sentencing, but we have to. There’s sometimes no room for them to go (in the jail) at the time they are sentenced.”

Carr said he hopes the county commission, county attorney, and he can come up with a plan to fall back on in the event the jail population increases to the point that conditions could become unconstitutional according to past federal court rulings.

“I don’t want to have to make an abrupt decision,” he sald. “It’s already drained our overtime budget. We’ve had to pull officers off patrol to add to the jail staff when the population has gotten high, and we’re feeding more than 330 inmates on a 220-man food budget. If not for our garden, we would have had to ask for more money.

“What are we going to do? That’s what I keep asking the state, and it’s been hard to get a clear answer from the state.”’