Since December 2013, the Greene County Jail has overpopulated with inmates.
Jail Administrator Karen White says the jail consists of eight cells and seven are currently operational and they’ve been having an average of ten inmates. She states that they typically deal with three to four inmates at the most.
When faced with an issue of too many inmates and not enough jail cells, White says they can make their holding cells and interrogation rooms into makeshift cells with sleeping cots or mattresses in the rooms. She also describes how they handle their crowding female inmate population.
“A lot of times our females are the ones that we will look to house other places first because it is difficult to house females here. We do not currently have an abundance of female employees and we always have to have a female employee in the building when there’s a female inmate. A lot of times it’s easier to send the females out first, and we will contact some of the surrounding counties and ask them if they could hold those people for us.”
Several current inmates are probation violators which White explains that they will be in jail longer because they were given a chance to prove themselves as law-abiding citizens and they couldn’t handle that responsibility.
White comments that the sheriff’s budget for the jail has been consistently amended because of the growing amount of money that they have had to spend over the last few months.
Sheriff Steve Haupert says they’ve spent $6,759 to house inmates at Carroll and Boone counties and a two-week stay for one inmate at Fort Dodge was $2,100 alone. Other increases in costs include water, food and transportation.
Each jail cell has its own camera to monitor each inmate as well as each holding cell and interrogation rooms. White raises another concern she has when putting inmates in rooms that aren’t designed as jail cells.
“You can’t as easily watch those people 24(hours per day) 7 (days per week) like we can where the cameras are. We do have cameras, but we can’t do it all the time like we do back in the jail. We try to make more frequent checks on those people.”
White adds that she doesn’t see this current trend slowing down anytime soon since the warmer weather seems to bring in more trouble.