Union County Sheriff Ricky Roberts appeared before the Quorum Court last month to inform Justices of the Peace of rising costs his office is facing in light of new federal regulations.
“The first order of business is to give the sheriff the opportunity to explain to the Quorum Court why he’s going to blow his budget,” District 1 JP Mike Dumas joked.
Roberts said his office received a bill in April for $8,985 from a juvenile detention facility, the cost of housing a teenager arrested in El Dorado from Dec. 17 through Jan. 31 at a rate of $75 per night and from Feb. 1 through April 7 at a rate of $85 per night.
“I didn’t budget for this because we didn’t know the law was going to be in place back then when we submitted a budget,” Roberts said.
The cost isn’t the only issue, though, Roberts said; ongoing backlogs in the judicial system have left some inmates — who haven’t even been convicted of crimes — in jail for months, or even years, as they await adjudication.
Juvenile incarceration
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump signed into law an amendment to the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act, which called “on states and localities to remove youth who are charged as adults from adult jails pretrial,” according to information provided to the News-Times by Roberts.
The law required that “youth (17 years of age and lower)” that were being held in an adult jail be transferred to a juvenile detention center by Dec. 21, 2021, a document from the Arkansas Department of Human Services states. Roberts noted that he was told only people 18 or older could be housed at the local county jail.
A teenager who was being held at the county jail on a felony gun charge was transferred to the Jack Jones Juvenile Detention Center in Pine Bluff when the regulation went into effect, Roberts said. He was held there through Jan. 31 at a cost of $75 per day. The price to house the teenager increased to $85 per day on Feb. 1.
The teenager was transported back to El Dorado on April 7 for a court hearing, Roberts said, when prosecutors nolle pros‘ed — dropped — the charges against him.
“If we’re going to hold these people, at least make them go to court, make them do what they’re supposed to do,” Roberts said. “I was hoping that (Prosecutor) Jeff Rogers was here because I was fixing to bend his ear.”
The teenager has since been re-arrested in relation to a recent drive-by shooting incident that occurred in El Dorado on April 19. He faces multiple felony charges, including six counts of aggravated assault, two counts of first-degree battery, felony with a firearm, terroristic act, first-degree criminal mischief, unlawful discharge of a firearm from a vehicle, engaging in violent criminal group activity and possession of a firearm by certain persons.
“The week after I pay the bill, he gets arrested for a shooting in the city limits again, so he’s back in the system,” Roberts said last Wednesday. “He’s got several arrests that involves a gun.”
The teen turns 18 in July, Roberts said, at which point he will be returned to the Union County jail.
Three other juveniles have been arrested since the regulations went into effect — all suspected in shootings —, Roberts said, and two are being held at the juvenile detention facility in Pine Bluff. The sheriff’s office is still waiting on bills for those suspects, which won’t be sent until after the teenagers have been moved back to the county jail or released.
The average daily housing rate at juvenile detention facilities is about $85 per day throughout Arkansas.
“What I’ll do is I’ll just wait on these other bills, whenever they come in, and then I’ll come back to you,” Roberts told JPs. “Evidently, they’re going to wait until they’re moved on until they send me a bill. I wish they wouldn’t do that.”
‘Bottleneck’
The sheriff’s office has more problems to deal with than just the cost of moving juvenile defendants, however, Roberts explained last month.
At the start and through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, jail capacity was scaled back; on May 21, 2021, for example, there were 163 inmates housed at the Union County jail. Roberts said last June that the jail can hold a maximum of 228 inmates.
There were about 200 inmates in the jail at the time of the April meeting of the Quorum Court, the sheriff said.
Between a court backlog, ongoing COVID-19 restrictions in place at Arkansas Department of Corrections facilities and an accumulation of inmates seeking evaluations for their mental fitness, operations at the UCSO are “just clogged up,” Roberts said, and the jail entrance might as well be “a revolving door.”
“You get all this combined and you get bottlenecked up,” Roberts said. “Our doors… it’s almost like we’ve got somebody back there 24/7 just oiling them. People come, people go.”
The sheriff said six inmates were determined months ago to be unfit to proceed to trial, at which point they’re supposed to be committed to the Department of Human Services for treatment. However, it took a recent special hearing where Judge Hamilton Singleton ordered a representative of the Arkansas State Hospital to find space for them within two weeks to get them transferred, Roberts said.
“They stayed in our jail for six, eight, 10 months. This is not a mental facility, this is a detention facility, right?” he said in April.
“A detention facility is not a place for the mentally ill,” he added on Thursday.
But the fault doesn’t lie on the inmates, Roberts said. Because of the court backlog, he said he feels some inmates are languishing in jail.
“I don’t know why it takes four, six, eight months to a year to get somebody to court. I just don’t understand it,” he said. “People say, ‘well you’re the police, you’re supposed to put people in jail and don’t worry about them.’ I can’t. There’s a lot of people that’s not getting proper representation… The system is failing them.”
Some progress
Some progress has been made on the issue of court backlogs in the past month, Roberts said on Thursday.
“They assigned a special prosecutor to look at some of these cases, to help move some of these cases along, so they have gotten a lot of traction over the last month, month-and-a-half, of disposing of a lot of the cases we’ve been talking about,” he said. “They’ve added some, not only special prosecutors, but they’ve also added some more public defenders to help the public defender side of the case log.”
“We’re already seeing a vast improvement in Union County with some of these cases that’s been lingering,” he continued.
Roberts said court backlogs aren’t unique to Union County, and he is glad that local authorities are now able to start addressing the load of cases that have been on the back burner through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Somebody gets arrested for a crime, they shouldn’t have to sit longer than six months, eight months, before their case is heard or adjudicated, but there’s so much backlog in the court system and in the ADC system, we can only do so much at a time,” he said. “It takes a while to work it out and get back on the right track… Everything we’re going through here in our little community is going on in any community in ‘Anywhere, USA.’”
As for continuing restrictions in transferring ADC inmates to state facilities, Roberts said one bright spot is that the state will soon start contributing more to the cost of housing such prisoners at county jails. Starting in the next fiscal year, the ADC will pay $40 per day to county jails for housing state prisoners, up from the $32 per day they’re currently paying.
It’s less than the approximately $53 per day the El Dorado Police Department and other municipal and county law enforcement agencies pay the UCSO for housing inmates, but it will help, Roberts said.
“That’s going to offset a little bit of the cost. It’s not necessarily covering the cost of an inmate, but it’s going to help a little more than the $32 a day. We’re grateful to get whatever we can from the state,” he said.
Closing the revolving door
Roberts said the rate at which minors are arrested ebbs and flows each year, but “juvenile crime is overall on the increase.”
“I think some of it is because… a lot of times it seems like we just slap them on the wrist and move on and don’t teach them right from wrong,” he said. “I’ve got four currently that are sitting in a juvenile center somewhere that, don’t get me wrong, (are alleged to have) committed heinous crimes, but there’s some reason as to why this is happening and we need to find out what’s causing it.”
Roberts’s thoughts on juvenile crime relate to a message he’s been preaching for several years — the necessity of finding out how to reduce high recidivism rates in the county.
“A lot of the young people today are seeing their grandfather went to the pen, their father went to the pen, their uncle went to the pen, and they think that’s the way of life, and you’ve got to break that cycle — to say there is a different way of life than to follow in those footsteps,” he said earlier this year when the jail announced a new re-entry program for local inmates. “We’ve got three or four generations in here right now, and it’s mind-boggling to me that we see the same people come and go; it’s almost like we’re having to have someone stand at the back door to oil it because it’s constantly revolving.”
The jail’s re-entry program kicked off in April following the hiring of Nicole Smith, a full-time re-entry coordinator. She is helping inmates in the program — which can accommodate up to 15 women and 30 men — prepare for the release from jail by helping them obtain necessary documents, connecting them to resources to find housing, education and transportation and leading life skills classes.
“The point we want to get across is at some point you’ve got to wake up and say ‘hey, that’s not the life I want. I don’t want to go and be confined to a cell,’” Roberts said Thursday.
JPs didn’t take any action last month regarding the jail’s budget. Roberts said he was able to find money for the first bill in another part of the UCSO budget and will appear before the Quorum Court again when he receives bills for the other juvenile defendants arrested in Union County.