Friday, November 19, 1999
40 inmates freed as jail nears limit
Judges asked to help with squeeze
BY DAN HORN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Dozens of nonviolent criminals are free this week because Hamilton County is running out of room at the jail.
A sudden increase in the county's inmate population has prompted worried court officials to recommend more lenient sentences and early releases for those jailed on minor charges.
One judge even suggested that prosecutors should stop seeking charges against so many defendants.
In a letter sent to all judges this week, Court Administrator Mike Walton warned that the jail population would exceed capacity unless the courts took immediate action.
“We're about tapped out,” Mr. Walton said Thursday. “The numbers are too high.”
The jail population has hovered around the court-imposed limit of 2,260 for most of the week, climbing as high as 2,105 on Monday.
Although it dropped to 1,992 on Thursday, Mr. Walton said that was due in part to the early release of more than 40 non-violent offenders at a special court hearing held Wednesday.
A spokesman for Sheriff Simon L. Leis, who runs the jails,
said the inmate population remains well above its average of 1,195.
“These have been the highest population numbers this year,” said the spokesman, Steve Barnett. “We aren't over the court limit, but we're getting close to it.”
Mr. Walton said several factors are contributing to the increase, including longer stays for violators of probation or parole.
According to one judge, another potential problem is an increase in the number of defendants who are indicted by grand juries on criminal charges.
Common Pleas Judge Norbert Nadel sent a letter Thursday suggesting that Prosecutor Mike Allen may be pursuing indictments without considering whether they would hold up in court.
Indictments are issued when prosecutors convince a grand jury that enough evidence exists for a case to go to court.
“It has been my experience that in recent months a number of cases have come through grand jury that either should not have been indicted or should have been indicted as misdemeanors,” Judge Nadel wrote, noting that some of those cases ended with an acquittal.
“It would seem to me that part of the problem of jail overcrowding might be addressed by a more careful review of the cases presented to grand jury.”
Mr. Allen said the number of indictments has gone up during the past year, but not enough to cause a problem.
“I'm not here to be a potted plant,” Mr. Allen said. “I'm going to be aggressive.”
He said a review of grand jury cases found an increase of about 10 percent in the number of indictments from 1998 to 1999. He said drug cases and assaults on police officers account for at least some of that increase.
“I am not insensitive to jail overcrowding problems,” said Mr. Allen, a former municipal court judge. “But my primary concern is not housing prisoners, it's prosecuting crime.”
Mr. Walton said a big reason for the increase appears to be an abundance of inmates serving time for parole or probation violations.
He said the parole violations are particularly troubling because those inmates could be serving sentences at state prisons instead of county jails.
But because the state facilities are just as crowded, parole officials order them to serve their time here.
To ease the pressure on jail space, Mr. Walton has asked judges to consider alternatives to jail sentences. Those alternatives include home incarceration, community service or probation.
Another release valve for jail crowding is a special court hearing held this week.
Dubbed the “Moses Docket” — as in “Let my people go” — it involved more than 60 inmates who were seeking an early release. Forty of them got their wish.
Jail space at county facilities has been an issue for years in Hamilton County.
In the early 1990s, the situation became so critical that a federal court stepped in to set limits on how many inmates could safely be housed in county facilities.
Mr. Walton said the recent increase has not pushed the county over that limit yet. But he noted that January — a big month for jail population — is nearing.
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