Jail crowding prompts officials to weigh shipping inmates out

David Kihara

Sunday, April 2, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

Severe crowding at the county jail is reaching crisis levels, with hundreds of inmates sleeping on cots and authorities planning to relieve the pressure by shipping inmates to a jail 175 miles away.

The problem is so serious that the Clark County Detention Center is also considering arranging to house about 50 inmates at a state prison, officials said.

"We're well past the state where we realize we have a problem," County Commission Chairman Rory Reid said during a meeting of criminal justice officials last week.

Even with more than 250 jail inmates sent to city lockups in Henderson and North Las Vegas, about 250 county detainees still must sleep on cots, said Mikel Holt, Metro Police deputy chief of the Clark County Detention Center.

The cots are scattered throughout the jail in about 10 day rooms, he said. "We are very rapidly using all the bed space here."

The Clark County Detention Center has 2,859 beds but well over 3,200 inmates.

Officials this week painted a bleak portrait of the booming jail population, where the number of detainees nearly doubled from 1994 to 2005. About 60,000 people are booked into the jail annually.

And the news gets even worse. Over the next 20 years, the county predicts it will need 6,030 beds to house inmates at the jail.

Jail officials are considering several short-term solutions to ease the crowding, including sending 50 inmates to the jail in Pioche in Lincoln County, a 3 1/2-hour drive from Las Vegas.

The cost would be about $70 a day per inmate in Lincoln County - about the same amount charged by the jails in Henderson and North Las Vegas. Lincoln County would provide the transportation for inmates about once a week, Holt said.

Another option is housing 50 inmates at Casa Grande, a transitional facility in Las Vegas. Casa Grande is for prison inmates who are transitioning from prison and often have jobs in the community.

Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, advocated what he called a "more sensible approach to the criminal justice issues" facing the county.

"The answer to the problem isn't to keep shipping people to other jails and building more prisons," Peck said. "The way to solve the problem is to rethink the way we write our laws and enforce the ones on the books."

One reason the jail is so full, he said, is that authorities are locking up people with mental health or substance abuse problems. These people need medical or drug treatment but can't get help in a community sorely lacking in such services, he said.

"There are a lot of people languishing in our jails who don't belong there," he said.

But law enforcement officials deny this, saying that only the most serious offenders are being detained and people who are facing vagrancy or even drunken driving offenses are not held there.

A population profile of the county jail shows that of the 3,283 inmates in February, 793, or 24 percent, were behind bars for murder, rape, assault, sexual offense or a weapons charge. The numbers also show that 379 people were in the detention center for narcotics charges and 912 people for robbery, burglary or larceny.