Metro: All beds in new jail are taken

Jace Radke

Monday, Feb. 23, 2004 | 11:17 a.m.

The Clark County Detention Center is scheduled to open 250 more beds for prisoners next month, but Metro Police officials are warning local governments that the facility is already at capacity.

When corrections officers are available to staff the new space next month, it will bring the total number of beds at the detention center to 2,860, but the majority of those extra beds already have people who are at other local jails waiting for them.

Currently Metro is paying $50 a day per inmate to house about 200 people at the Las Vegas City Jail and the North Las Vegas Detention Center, said Chief Paul Martin, director of the Metro-run Clark County Detention Center.

By 2008 Metro estimates that it will need space to house 4,000 people, and ultimately Sheriff Bill Young would like to see a new holding facility for those who commit low-level and misdemeanor crimes.

With no timetable or plans in place for such a facility Metro officials are cautioning that the extra jail beds in Clark County should not be filled with hundreds of federally held illegal immigrants.

"There is going to come a time when we're all going to need those beds," Martin said. "We need to work regionally. The dollars that cities are paid to house federal prisoners are nice, but we don't want to get locked into long-term contracts to hold imported (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) prisoners arrested in California."

The county's detention center along with the jails in Henderson, Las Vegas and North Las Vegas and Mesquite total about 5,100 beds, and about 4,500 are currently filled, Martin said.

Authorities say the federal government has 380 prisoners facing criminal charges in jails in Clark County. Though the numbers fluctuate, on any given day as many as 400 additional prisoners are being held in Clark County on immigration charges filed the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, federal officials said.

The U.S. Marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have a 15-year agreement with North Las Vegas that allows space for up to 450 federal prisoners at that city's detention center, said Deputy Supervisory U.S. Marshal Fidencio Rivera.

The agreement took effect in 2001 when the federal government paid $5.8 million to North Las Vegas to construct an area for the federal prisoners. The Marshals also have an agreement to house prisoners with Las Vegas, but the city determines how many federal inmates it will allow and how long they will be housed at its facility at Stewart Avenue and Mojave Road.

About 60 percent of the federal defendants for whom the Las Vegas office of the Marshals is responsible are held in North Las Vegas, with the rest in Las Vegas. Las Vegas charges $65 per federal prisoner a day and North Las Vegas charges $72.

The $67 million expansion to the 20-year-old Clark County Detention Center added 1,372 beds to that facility and was completed in the fall of 2002.

The expansion was Phase Two of a plan that originated in 1996 under Sheriff Jerry Keller, Martin said.

"The idea has always been to have three levels," Martin said. "The old detention center is for the high-level offenders while the expansion is for the medium-level.

"We'd like to move the lower-level offenders to a different facility and put them in work programs that benefit the tax payers of the county."

These low-level offenders and misdemeanor offenders could include those charged with driving under the influence or drug offenders. Those facing a short sentence of a few days to a few months in jail could be moved to the lower-level facility, Martin said.

"Seventy percent of our (jail) population is pretrial felons, and it makes sense to have them close to the courthouse," Martin said. "Those that are serving short sentences or whose trials are months away we could send to this other facility."

There are no plans or budget for a new jail at this point, but it remains a cheaper long-term option for Metro over continuing to purchase bed spaces in other jails, which costs about $300,000 a month, officials said.