Worth exploring
Fayette County has had an overcrowding problem at its prison for years. Built in 1889, it was designed to house 85 inmates. It now houses a maximum number of 262 inmates. Once that figure is reached, inmates must be shipped to nearby prisons with the costs being paid by county taxpayers. Over the years, county taxpayers have paid millions of dollars for such practices.
Central to the problem is Fayette County’s rising crime rate, which results in more arrests and more people being sent to prison. The huge influx of crime has made it difficult for the county’s judicial system to operate in a fair and efficient manner.
Unfortunately, some defendants who can’t make bail are forced to wait in jail for months before their cases can even be heard. That’s especially tragic for defendants who are found innocent.
Consider also those defendants who are found guilty of serious crimes and then shipped to a state prison. If their trials could have been held earlier, county taxpayers would have been spared the additional costs for their incarcerations.
Ways must be found to bring cases to trial quicker so that innocent people don’t have to spend a day more than necessary in prison, and those who are guilty can be moved out of the facility as quickly as possible. If that can happen, it would definitely lessen the overcrowding problem at the prison, resulting in lower costs for county taxpayers.
In fact, Rich Bower promised to streamline the county’s judicial system and operate it more efficiently, when he was running for district attorney of Fayette County last spring. Bower defeated incumbent Jack Heneks in the Democratic Party Primary last spring and was elected in the general election, as the Republican Party failed to field an opponent to him.
Bower and other judicial officials would be well served to take a look a Lancaster County’s judicial system. According to a recent story in the Lancaster New Era, the prison population at the Lancaster County Prison has dropped by 300 over the past three years, and the number of cases more than a year old has dropped from 24 percent in 2012 to 8 percent last month.
Credit for the turnaround was given to a program called the Prison Population Initiative. Formed in 2013, it was designed to ease overcrowding of the prison by making its court system run more efficiently.
It operates on the premise of getting all relevant parties together and deciding whether a person charged with a crime needs to be in or sent to prison. The goal is to determine the likely outcome of a case and get it resolved more efficiently.
To be fair, Fayette County already has veterans and mental health specialty courts, which do seem to be working. A day reporting center has also been set up where non-violent defendants can avoid jail by meeting certain requirements. All of that has helped to cut back on the prison overcrowding problem. But more work remains. And looking elsewhere could be a good way of finding some permanent solutions to the problem.
It’s possible that what works in Lancaster County won’t work in Fayette County. But we won’t know that for sure until those in charge of our court system reach out to officials in Lancaster County to find out how their system works. We would urge our officials to do so as quickly as possible. One thing is clear. Bower won’t be able to do it alone. He’s going to need the help of the county judges, the county commissioners and everyone else involved with the county’s judicial system.
Working together they should be able to make the system both fairer and less costly.