Monroe County jail notebook: Population hits week-long stretch over ACLU functional limit
Monroe County’s jail population stood at 237 Saturday, ending a full week above the ACLU’s 229 functional-capacity figure. The jail’s 10-day rolling average has fallen by about 20 since late July, while records show substantial turnover among people who are incarcerated.
Monroe County’s jail population stood at 237 on Saturday (Sept. 12), which made for a solid week when the total population of the jail was more than the ACLU’s version of the jail’s function capacity, which is 229.
The end of the previous week started at 227 and ticked up to as high as 242 and dipped to 230 on Friday, before bumping back up on Saturday.
A week ago Monroe County’s GIS team rolled out a new jail data dashboard. The dashboard is updated routinely, which means Monroe County residents don’t need to wait for weekly updates from a news outlet. The dashboard breaks down the demographic profile of inmates, and provides a statistical breakdown of the types of offenses inmates are charged with.
The B Square has tracked the numbers starting on July 21, when the jail held 247 people. By Sept. 12, the population had fallen by 10 to 237.
Ten days into that span, the 10-day rolling average was about 254. The most recent rolling 10-day average, on Saturday (Sept. 12) was about 234, or 20 less than at the start of The B Square’s reports.
It’s 5 more than the ACLU gives the jail’s functional capacity in its federal lawsuit that it filed in July on behalf of jail inmates.
Monroe County sheriff Ruben Marté has given a lower figure for functional capacity. His July overcrowding report started with 294 reported beds, subtracted housing that he said cannot be treated as general-population space, leaving 233 available general-housing beds. Applying the same 80% principle yields a functional capacity of 186.
The difference between the two snapshots at the start and the end of the period The B Square has tracked does not capture the turnover in the jail during that period. Of the 247 people who were there on July 21, 131 of them were still there on Sept. 12. That means 116, or almost 47% of the people who were in jail at the start of the period, had left by the end.
At the same time, 106 people who arrived after July 21 were still incarcerated on Sept. 12. The 131 people who were present at both endpoints, together with those 106 later arrivals, account for the current population of 237.
That comparison still does not capture people who arrived after July 21 and then left before Sept. 12. A total of at least 514 people departed the jail during that span. It’s “at least” because some people booked into jail don’t stay in jail long enough to appear in the daily population report. An example of that is the man who was arrested on a charge of street camping on Aug. 7, who was released about a half hour later. Among those who departed during the time The B Square has tracked the numbers, the median length of stay was 2 days.
Over the full 47-day period, the average daily population was about 239. The highest count was 264 on July 31. The lowest was 216 on Aug. 28.
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