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SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder said the county's jail was at capacity the day it first opened its doors in 2000.
Within the first six months, jail administrators were forced to release prisoners early due to overcrowding, Winder said. It became a problem and a trend that the jail would face off-and-on for the next 15 years.
In 1995, Salt Lake County residents approved a 20-year bond to build the current Salt Lake County Jail. The bond resulted in the county spending $9.4 million annually to pay off that debt.
In December, that bond will be paid off.
In order to address the public safety needs of the county for the next two decades, Winder, along with Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams and Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, announced Tuesday that they will be asking the Salt Lake County Council to continue collecting that annual $9.4 million in taxpayer money and start putting it into services that will put an end to the jail's so-called "revolving door" for low-risk, chronic offenders.
"We can no longer afford to tread water when it comes to addressing our broken criminal justice system," McAdams said. "We cannot jail our way out of our problems."
Specifically, Winder wants to not only reopen the Oxbow Jail within the next three years, but also build a new facility called a Community Corrections Center, which would be something similar to combining a jail and a halfway house.
"We are going to build a Community Corrections Center, a first in the state of Utah —a center that is designed to take individuals for substance abuse, mental health and other minor offense-related issues, and bring them into a central location where they can immediately be aligned with the appropriate services," the sheriff said.
Rather than arresting a person and ordering them to get treatment, Winder said service providers will already be housed in the Community Corrections Center and ready to assist.
We are going to build a Community Corrections Center, a first in the state of Utah —a center that is designed to take individuals for substance abuse, mental health and other minor offense-related issues, and bring them into a central location where they can immediately be aligned with the appropriate services.
–Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder
"We are facing one of those collective moments in the history of Salt Lake County where decisions have to be made. — decisions that will truly impact our community for the next 10 to 15 years," Winder said.
Since the jail opened, it has never had an increase in its bed space. The Salt Lake County Jail has a maximum capacity of 2,000 beds. During that same time, the population of Salt Lake County has increased by about 230,000, he said.
The problem, according to Winder, is that people who are arrested on misdemeanor crimes who need treatment for either drug or alcohol abuse or for mental illness, are typically released from jail before they receive any of those services and then don't show up for treatment. Instead, they are re-arrested and begin the cycle all over.
"They're not going into drug treatment, they're not showing up for court. What's happening is a warning is being issued and they're cycling through the jail," Winder said. "They're simply walking around being re-arrested over and over again. That cycle must stop.
"When individuals in our community know that the very introduction to the criminal justice system is ineffective, then the rest of the criminal justice system is doomed to failure," he continued.
The sheriff said the situation has gotten so bad that within the next two months, he may be forced to institute a cap management plan, meaning that rather than being booked and released, an arrested person won't even be let in the door.
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Utah County prosecutors have come up with a new way to keep an eye on people who keep ending up in court over and over again. They call it the "Persona Non Grata" list."How can we get somebody into treatment, how can we begin the process when individuals on the street will tell a cop, 'Go ahead and book me. I'll be out in 15 minutes?'" he asked. "It is a system that we simply cannot tolerate in this county any more where we simply bring human beings in, process them, and kick them to the curb."
Gill agreed that the county needs to start booking the right people for the right reasons rather than tossing everyone into the same facility.
"Don't get us wrong, crime is something we take very seriously," he said. "But the days of simply incarcerating everyone as a broad public policy are no longer financially sustainable and cannot be supported."
McAdams said Salt Lake County residents will be getting an notice explaining the proposal in the mail sometime in the next week.
Contributing: Nkoyo Iyamba
