High Time

Type_webhead_here High Time

For years Richmond leaders have paid lip service -- at best -- to the deplorable conditions at the City Jail. Members of the City Council and various mayors have tut-tutted and agreed that something must be done. But they did nothing. Until now. Mayor Dwight Jones has proposed spending more than $138 million during the next several years to create a new jail by adding to and improving the existing one. The idea deserves the full support of everyone who understands the seriousness of the problem.

Two years ago Times-Dispatch reporter David Ress and photographer Eva Russo documented the bedlam that permeates the facility despite the best efforts of the staff. Sheriff C.T. Woody and his deputies have improved conditions, but there is only so much they can do in an institution housing -- without air-conditioning -- double the number of prisoners it is supposed to, many of whom suffer from mental illnesses that should put them in hospital rooms, not jail cells. "They get worse here," said Woody. "They don't get better."

Incarceration should not be a walk in the park. But neither should it be a descent into hell -- for the inmates, or for their relatives. The mothers of small-time offenders should not have to fear for their sons' physical safety, or be coerced by phone calls into wiring money to other inmates' bank accounts to keep their children safe. And the deputies who serve the public by working at the jail should not have to feel as if they, too, had been sentenced to hard time that must be served in eight-hour increments.

Alarms about the jail have been sounding for years. Woody commendably raised the volume. Jones commendably has heard them -- and heeded them. It's about time someone did.