BY JANICE MORSE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HAMILTON -- Despite more than a dozen alternatives to jail, Butler County's jail population has continued "a dramatic, meteoric rise" in the past three years, says Butler County Common Pleas Judge Michael J. Sage.
Speaking Monday to the Jail Working Group, which is studying options for building a jail to replace the county's old, crowded one, Judge Sage showed charts illustrating trends he and the other four common pleas judges face.
In 1985, there were 692 new criminal cases filed; this year, the judges expect to see 1,571 of them. On top of that, each judge must deal with old but active cases and civil cases.
"Each judge has an active caseload of like 1,500 cases. It just gives you an idea of what we're dealing with," Judge Sage said. The statistics underscore the county's need for a bigger jail -- and make it clear that even more jail alternatives are needed, said Michael A. Fox, a Butler County commissioner who is heading the jail group.
"Whatever jail we build, there still are going to be more customers than we've got room for," Mr. Fox said.
The nine-member group of criminal justice and other county officials, which has been meeting weekly for the past month, hopes to complete its work by mid-November.
The group already has decided the new jail should be large enough to hold 400 prisoners, but key questions, ranging from funding to site selection, are yet to be addressed.
The current jail was built in 1971 and is supposed to hold fewer than 85 prisoners -- yet it routinely houses more than 190 inmates, said County Administrator Derek Conklin.
Previous attempts to get voters to approve new taxes to pay for the new jail have been defeated; the group's goal is to examine ways to build a jail less expensively and to find different funding for it. Butler County's jail crowding reflects state and national trends, Judge Sage said. In fact, state jail crowding is exacerbating the crowding in local jails, he said.
New state laws are continually pushing low-level felons, drunken-driving offenders and domestic violence abusers into county jails, Judge Sage said. Although he agrees with the laws' intent, their effect means higher local jail populations. "They almost mandate incarceration -- but they mandate incarceration at the local level," he said. Judges do have more punishment options now than eight years ago, when Judge Sage first took the bench, he said. The options range from a verbal reprimand to community service, electronic surveillance and supervised probation.
Still, he said, "You can only put people on probation so many times."
About half of all new criminal cases end with a prison sentence; 25 percent end up serving some time in the local jail, Judge Sage said. That means 75 percent of defendants in new criminal cases must spend at least some time in the county jail.
"There's a certain segment of the community that simply must be incarcerated -- and it's important that there be jail space available for those people," he said.
