Monroe County sheriff stresses new jail’s functional capacity, not bed count, wants end to ‘tag, you’re it’

Monroe County sheriff Ruben Marté wants county councilors and county commissioners to start thinking about the size of a planned new jail in terms of its functional capacity, instead of its raw bed count.

Marté also wants the county executive and fiscal bodies to attach more urgency to the planned new jail project.

Those were the two big takeaways from Marté’s presentation to county councilor’s and county commissioners on Thursday afternoon.

About the size of the jail, the county council weighed in with a policy document several months ago that includes a 400-bed limit on the new jail facility. That would still increase the number of beds by 40-percent over the current number of 287.

But the upshot of Marté’s Thursday presentation is that a 400-bed facility would not have the functional capacity to easily handle the kind of typical population profile that the current facility now sees.

The standard “functional capacity” of a jail is defined by the Indiana Office of Corrections county jail operations division as 80 percent of the total bed count, according to Marté.

If it is analyzed as the needed functional capacity, then the 400-bed figure would translate into a raw bed count of 500. That’s closer to the size of the jail that Marté thinks is needed, he told The B Square after Thursday’s meeting. Room to expand is also needed, Marté said.

During Thursday’s meeting, Marté called for an end to some of the politics surrounding the jail pointing to what he called a game of “tag, you’re it” that had recently been played between county commissioners and the county councilors, about who decides the bed count for the new jail.

Marté described the decision about the size of the new jail like this: “It’s all of us—we’re going to have to come to a consensus about what this is going to be.”

Need for urgency

At Thursday afternoon’s meeting, Marté said that the county is only “barely closer to construction” of the jail project than it was on Jan. 1, 2023, when he was first sworn into office.

Marté said that the jail project should not be a “political football” or a “political hot potato.” He also called to and to what he called “chicken-and-egg mentality”—the idea that the bed count can’t be decided without a budget, and the budget can’t be decided without a bed count.

Marté stressed that the new jail project should focus on creating a safe, constitutional environment.

It is now roughly three years since the county’s two consultants delivered reports, one of which concluded that Monroe County’s jail is “failing” and is not able to provide constitutional levels of care.

The jail currently operates under a 2009 settlement agreement with the ACLU, which filed a lawsuit over crowded conditions at the jail. The settlement agreement has been extended several times.

The rated capacity of the jail at the time of the settlement agreement, based on Indiana’s County Jail Standards and inspections by the Indiana Department of Correction, was 278, with 248 secure beds. The other 30 beds are for trustees and offenders attending a special program.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement, when the population for the available security beds reaches 244, the jail staff has to contact the circuit court judges and request an order releasing inmates in order to avoid the population exceeding the jail’s capacity.

Functional capacity versus bed count

The big theme of Thursday’s meeting was the difference between functional capacity, compared to raw bed count.

Marté was supported with his presentation by jail commander Kyle Gibbons, chief deputy sheriff Phil Parker, and three of the jail staff—captain Joshua Evoy, sergeant Mike Ruiz and officer Josh Wilson.

The councilors and commissioners were first presented with some of the basic constraints under which the jail operates, when it comes to housing prisoners. Indiana’s administrative code on county jail standards says that a jail has to develop an objective classification scheme for prisoners.

In Monroe County’s jail, the classification system includes minimum, medium and maximum security prisoners. Minimum security is the classification for people who are involved in non-violent crimes, low-level felonies, and misdemeanors, with a low escape risk and minimal history of institutional misconduct.

Medium security is for prisoners with a lower risk of violence or escape but increased instances of institutional misconduct.

Maximum security is designated for prisoners who face serious violent felony charges or have shown several acts of disciplinary misconduct while in custody, posing a high risk of violence or escape.

In addition to the three basic levels of security, special considerations can require separation of inmates from the general population. Those who need protection from other inmates are supposed to go into protective custody. Sex offenders can’t be housed with other prisoners. Other factors include specific inmates who have to be separated from each other and medical needs that require frequent attention, and mental health issues.

The highlight of the presentation was an interactive exercise based on a spreadsheet that Ruiz had set up. It assumed a 400-bed facility with a design for cell-blocks, dormitories, and special cells recommended by the county’s design-build consultant for the jail project, which is DLZ Corporation.

The first exercise was to take 230 prisoners with a profile of classifications that the current facility had recently experienced, and to assign them to accommodations in the 400-bed facility.

Assigned the role of sheriff was councilor Peter Iversen. Councilor Kate Wiltz was assigned the role of jail commander, and commissioner Julie Thomas played the role of chief deputy sheriff.

Interactive Task

The trio did manage to assign all 230 prisoners to a place in the 400-bed facility. But they resorted to putting 5 of the 27 male mental health prisoners into individual padded cells—instead of in the mental health dormitory, which had just 22 beds.

But prisoners in padded cells are not inside of a cell block area, so they don’t have access to TV, they’re not socialized with other people. They have to rely on corrections officers to get them out for their showers and their phone calls, chief deputy Parker noted.

Jail commander Gibbons told them that because the five had been assigned to padded cells, they’d no longer be in programs, getting interaction with social workers or group therapy, trying to get them back to the general population.

That was the result of dealing with the space that was available, Gibbons said. It was plenty of space, judged by raw bed count, but not enough, based on the functional needs of the jail population that day.

Based on a June 25 briefing for county councilors,  the difference in hard construction cost between a 500-bed jail and a 400-bed jail is about $20.2 million. That’s based on 120,000 square feet for a 400-bed facility and 150,000 square feet for a 500-bed facility and a construction cost of $674 per square foot.

The hard construction cost for a 400-bed new jail is estimated at $80.9 million.

At Thursday afternoon’s joint meeting, Marté said that it is not an unreasonable expectation that the courts should be co-located with the new jail. But he listed the co-location of several offices that he thinks reflect “unrealistic financial expectations”: probation offices; community corrections; public defender offices; on-site mental health facilities; volunteer services office; on-site cafeteria; and day-care facilities.

One slide in Marté’s deck stated: “Not a single square foot of the jail can be sacrificed to accommodate other wishes or wants.”

Proposed new jail location

The location of the new jail is still not decided, and got no airtime at Thursday’s joint meeting of the county council and the county commissioners.

If the topic of new jail location had received any deliberation, then one potential sore point would have been mitigated, through action of the county council at its meeting on Tuesday.

The council agreed by unanimous consent to “table indefinitely” a motion to de-appropriate some of the money that came from a $10.5 million bond, the issuance of which was approved at the Oct. 11, 2022 meeting of the county council.

Even if to “table indefinitely” is not a motion under Robert’s Rules, the intent of the council appears to have been to “postpone indefinitely,” which has the effect of defeating the motion.

The purpose of that bond was to pay for the real estate purchase for a new jail.

It was at councilor Kate Wiltz’s urging that the item was put on the agenda, after county commissioners announced that it is the responsibility of the county council, not the commissioners  to work with the sheriff to determine the bed count for a planned new jail facility.

Wiltz indicated that she had wanted the council to consider de-appropriating the money in “an effort to become more informed about the details around property purchasing.”

If the council had de-appropriated the money,  the county commissioners would have needed the council to act again to appropriate it, in order to pay for whatever land were to be purchased for the new jail. So de-appropriation was seen as a way for the county council to take control of the decision on the choice of a new jail location.

But under state law, the county council already has to approve the purchase of any new significant property, regardless of how it is funded. That’s something that councilor Geoff McKim got county attorney Molly Turner-King to confirm at Tuesday’s meeting.

County commissioners are currently considering the North Park PUD,  but has heard opposition from nearby property owners. At Tuesday’s meeting, councilor Marty Hawk said, “I think that we should leave all options open to whatever location works best for the county and works best for the taxpayer.” Hawk added, “I do not support what appears to be the preferred location of the county commissioners at present.”

McKim echoed Hawk’s view that all property should still be on the table at this point. Previously, when the council was briefed in late June on some budget numbers for the new jail,  McKim indicated that the Thomson PUD should be back in the mix for consideration, as part of a potential phased approach.

The deal-breaker for using the Thomson property had been a two-year delay to move Duke Energy power lines. McKim said at the late June meeting that it would be worth considering if the jail could be built at a place on the property that would not require relocation of the power lines. That way, construction of the jail could start, while the construction of the justice complex waits until the power lines are moved.