2/13/08 - Sheriff: New jail should be in city

(As published by Cortland Standard, Ida Pease reporting)

Cortland County Sheriff Lee Price suggested Tuesday that a new jail should be built in the city.
“I’m not prepared to give you a recommendation. I don’t want to shock you,” Price told the county Judiciary and Public Safety Committee.

Price said if the county remodeled or expanded the current jail on Greenbush Street in the city, a big cost would be for personnel. He explained that inmates would have to be moved if the jail was remodeled for better efficiency and they would have to be transported back and forth for court.

Price said the biggest ongoing expense in a jail is personnel so an efficient design is necessary in building a new jail.

Capt. Bud Rigg, jail administrator, said with a more efficient design the number of inmates could be nearly doubled without changing the staffing. He said the most efficiency the current county jail can obtain is one correctional officer to 24 inmates (providing there are no females) but the design would allow one officer to oversee 40 inmates.

The cost of a new jail could reach $30 million.

“I think we need to build for the future,” Price said, noting the jail should be attached to a county facility that also includes a common booking area for city and county police. He said the county does not have enough holding cells to handle city cases. Price suggested extra meetings about the jail be held outside committee meetings because discussions could become lengthy.

Committee Chairman Tom Williams (R-Homer) said judges, courts, probation and jail officials would all have input on how they impact the jail and projections for the future.

Price said a notebook each legislator on the committee had been given had all the studies from the last five years including one done by the National Institute for Corrections and a local one that included input from former District Attorney Tom Jewett, former Probation Director James Cunningham and Roy Lewis, former jail administrator.