Sheriff opposes using regional jail

With Hancock County jail operating costs projected to total $5.5 million this year, or nearly 28% more than three years earlier, the county commissioners want to stem the tide. The commissioners have been considering scaling back jail operations by holding inmates for shorter stays and then transporting them to a regional jail in Stryker for the rest of their terms. Reductions in jail operations are strongly opposed by the Sheriff's Office, Findlay Police Department, local judges and others. It would risk the safety of the public and deputies and police officers, Sheriff Michael Cortez said. It also would cost taxpayers more money, not less as had been advertised by the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio (CCNO), in Stryker, he said. The CCNO's selling point: its daily inmate charge is $78 versus Hancock County's daily inmate cost of $107-$108 in 2024. Some of the cost differences are attributable to the jails' differing styles. Hidden costs But the comparison also leaves out huge costs and other ramifications for Hancock County to use the regional jail, Cortez said. Various scenarios of curtailing jail operations would end up costing the county at least $400,000 more per year than having the full-service jail, Jail Administrator Capt. Jesse Sterrett said. Deputies would be making many trips back and forth to the jail in Stryker for transports of newly arrested prisoners; and existing inmates having to appear for court hearings. The drive to Stryker is 75 minutes one way, so deputy overtime pay would rise. Additionally, more staff would have to be hired to maintain regular deputy coverage in Hancock County, Sterrett and Jail Operations Lt. Joe Hartman said. The commissioners had been told by CCNO officials that it would offer three bus trips per day to transport prisoners between Hancock County and CCNO. But Sterrett said that in later conversations with CCNO, the Sheriff's Office was told three trips per day could not be done immediately. It might become doable at some point for CCNO with a purchase of an additional bus, and hiring and training of more staff. CCNO has three buses already serving Fulton, Williams, Henry and Defiance counties and Toledo. Even if CCNO would provide three trips per day, that would be far short of Hancock County's needs, Hartman said. Local judges constantly receive motions from local attorneys resulting in a need to see an inmate quickly, not according to a bus schedule. 'That's the law' Local judges "may set a hearing and maybe quickly, depending on what the circumstances are in the inmate's case, and they may need to see somebody now," Hartman said. "They may call over and say we need to see this guy at 3 o'clock, and it's 11 (o'clock). So we would have to go up there and get them and bring them down." If bond is posted for an inmate, the inmate needs to appear in court for a hearing and they must be released in a reasonable amount of time, Hartman said. "That's what the law says. You can't just wait until the next available bus to bring them down to be released," he said. "I mean, you would literally have people being transported 24/7 because someone can bond out overnight through Municipal Court and we would have to go up there and get them and bring them back down here. As soon as they bond out, we have to bring them down." The Sheriff's Office handles inmates under the jurisdiction of not only Hancock County Common Pleas Court and Findlay Municipal Court, but also Tiffin-Fostoria Municipal Court, and County Juvenile Court. Each court has its own processes. "It's hard to narrow all of these scenarios down and say, 'We can cover this,'" Hartman said. "This county is way too big to be sending everybody out to a non-adjacent county on top of it. If it was right over the border, maybe a little more feasible, but not an hour and 15 minutes away each direction." Imperiled deputies Actually, the total transport time sometimes would be much more. "The hour and 15 minutes is just the drive time (one way). That doesn't include the wait time that we may have to experience when we get there for (CCNO) to accept them," Sheriff Cortez said. "Once we get there if for some reason they refuse them for medical purposes, then we have to take them to a hospital up there, somewhere, and have them cleared medically and then bring them back. And so that could be another hour, hour and a half, two hours, multiple." "You can easily have one person in that scenario spend five, six hours just on one transport in that given scenario," he said. The long-distance travel also puts at risk the safety of the deputy or police officer, Cortez and Findlay Police Chief James Mathias said. If the jail were to be reduced to a temporary holding facility, "we would have to be transporting every fresh arrest up there around the clock basically," Hartman said. Fixed costs Another option, limiting inmate stays to 12 days, also is problematic because jail staffing levels and standards could not be decreased. "If we were to do that scenario, we can't really close down our staffing levels because we still need a place to hold different types of inmates because we have to keep juveniles and adults separate, females from males separate, violent (from) nonviolent. So we have all these different areas," Hartman said. "We can't put all the males on one side, and all the females on the other and call it good. So you basically need the same staffing levels to have that scenario." "We're right back to where we were before because we still have to facilitate a virtually full-service jail in terms of staffing levels, in terms of state standards, food, medical services, etc., all of those are very close to identical to a full-service jail, for a 12-day jail," Sterrett said. And while making the jail a 12-day facility would save some transports to Stryker for newly arrested persons, it would not eliminate transports for court hearings and bonding, which occur all hours of the day, Hartman said. Public safety All of the added costs and problems related to a reduced jail operation can result in compromising public safety. "The courts may not be inclined to put out (arrest) warrants for certain types of offenses because they do not want to do all these transports to other places," Hartman said. "So you may have people on the street that probably should be in jail, but we're not putting them in jail." There is one sure-fire way to reduce jail operating costs and maximize safety for everybody: by building a new jail. Several years ago it was estimated that would cost $50 to $100 million, and costs for materials have risen a lot since then, Sterrett said. "It may cost us a lot of money upfront to build a facility, but once we have it, it'll be cheaper to run," Hartman said. "So in the end, we will gain some money back."