Richmond jail makes changes to handle overcrowding until new facility is built

SLIDESHOW: See what the city is doing to ease overcrowding at the jail.

Change at Richmond's overcrowded jail so far hasn't meant bricks and mortar.

"The jail is still overcrowded, they keep coming in. We're always at 1,400 to 1,600 in a facility built in the 1960s for 850," Sheriff C.T. Woody Jr. said.

The stumbling block so far has been money.

But on Thursday, Mayor Dwight C. Jones proposed to spend $2.25 million next year and $138.4 million over five years to build a new jail at the site of the current facility on Oliver Hill Way in the East End.

The plan would be a combination of renovating the existing jail and adding new floors for facilities above the current wings.

Christopher Beschler, acting chief administrative officer, said the city hopes to have the work done by 2013. The improvements would mean more facilities for drug treatment, electronic monitoring and mental-health treatment for the hundreds of nonviolent offenders now jamming the four-decade-old facility, he said.

There's slightly less interest now from other localities in a regional jail, for which the state would pick up half the cost, but the city is still exploring that option as well as partnership with a private firm. It will most likely be one or the other approach, though, that gets a new jail built, Woody said.

Money is a problem in other ways, too. Woody has only 452 deputies, when the State Compensation Board says the jail needs 479.

It's hard to hang on to deputies because of the pay -- an average of $31,340 a year -- the hours they work and the difficult conditions at the jail, where on summer nights temperatures can exceed 100 degrees.

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In the meantime, the sheriff's office is managing a facility that houses 700 more men and women than it was designed for. The population routinely includes hundreds with mental-health problems and dozens awaiting trial on minor charges for which the sentence is less than the time they spend waiting for their day in court.

Inmates now have to squeeze into the bottom bunks in the jail's big general population dormitory cells -- the bunk beds now go three high, not just two. Going three-high means 20 more places to sleep but 10 fewer bunk beds, creating an additional open space in the cells that is roughly five paces by 15 paces.

It also means no more inmates left on the floor, where in the past dozens sometimes had to sleep.

"Tier bosses," inmates who without the approval of jail officials would dictate when or if an inmate could move from a mattress on the floor or sleep in the safer, front rows of bunks, no longer have that power.

"The tier bosses are gone," Woody said. It is a huge step forward to tighten control in a jail that has an inmate population larger than all but a handful of state prisons.

Maj. Michael Whitt, jail operations commander, said the additional space from the new bedding and a ban on inmates hanging clothing on their bed frames ease the burden on deputies a bit.

The changes make it easier for deputies to see into the jail's tiers -- the big dormitory cells that routinely house more than 100 men at time.

And the new practice of assigning beds means more control in the big tiers, he said.

"If I'm supposed to be in bed 42, I'd better be in bed 42," said Charles R. Greene, who is in for possession of cocaine, robbery and trespassing.

"Everything is a lot safer."

The little bit of extra common space means less jostling and fewer excuses for fighting or bullying, inmates say. Having a bed instead of a mattress on the floor makes a big difference, too.

Assaults in the jail are down to fewer than two a week: five years ago they had averaged five or more a week.

"Just not sleeping on the floor, not having people stepping or walking on you -- it's just a lot quieter," said Harry Bland, serving 12 months for possession of drugs and forgery.

"I don't think the punishment is any different; it's not that the changes make it more comfortable."

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The extra space and the undercutting of tier bosses clears the way for additional programs, Woody said.

In one of the jail's toughest tiers -- F-2 -- volunteers from the McShin Foundation now spend several hours a day, seven days a week, behind bars with 100 inmates, mostly felons, running an addiction-recovery program.

They're there, with a deputy, in a tier where deputies used to venture behind the bars only in groups of a half dozen.

"I've been coming to this jail since 1987; it was very rough here," said Tremayne I. McKeiver, in jail for a probation violation and who signed up for the McShin program hoping this time to kick his addiction.

"If this place can change, so can I."

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.