Elected through Terror

Untitled Part 22

One of the things the Corrections Manager did, that shows that he wanted full control over the jail (and his domain) was his 'order' to the clerks and CO that if there was a problem in the jail to call him before anybody else, and he would come down to evaluate the situation and decide if anyone needed to be advised. While most of the calls were mundane, there was more than one that was serious and the patrol sergeant should have been told, immediately. But failure to call him first would get them on his 'list' and he would make them 'pay' one way or the other, he could be vindictive.

When that finally came to my attention, I ordered that the on-duty sergeant would be advised and he would decide if the manager or I needed to be contacted. The manager was not happy.

We were in my Office when I told him what was going to be done, and reaffirmed that I wanted him to be more open with me. Angrily, he said 'my responsibility begins at that door' pointing back towards the jail area. I said, 'MY responsibility begins at the front door and includes all of it!'

He got the message. However, he still undermined me whenever he could.

We had weekly staff meetings where the sergeants, UnderSheriff and the Manager could bring up things and help turn the Office around. COs would ask him to bring things up, but he didn't, after a while I learned that he would go back and tell them that the sergeants cut them down and the Sheriff said no.

Talking about undermining, me, the rest of management and the morale of the CO - they had some good ideas once they were presented.

It took a while, but he was eventually terminated.

During my first meeting with the County Budget Committee, I reviewed what was happening with the law suits across the state.

I had not digested all of what I learned and would learn as I continued to talk to the other Sheriff's but, at least we had a plan of action – an expensive one, but it needed to be done.

I took the recommendations from the advisor and a five year plan to address those recommendations. They were prioritized so the most important could be done first. They signed off on the plan.

As I did more research and looked at our facility it became more apparent that there would be things that we couldn't overcome; our facility was just too old. What we would hope for is that what we were doing would be enough to hold off until we could get a new jail built.

I told the County Judge that if we are sued we would not fight the suit, but try to work with the attorney. In a law suit of this kind if any part of the complaint is upheld then the Federal Judge can award attorney fees and other fees up to three times the amount requested. We could not afford to run that risk – we had too many deficiencies that could not be fully corrected in the aged facility.

When we were finally sued, and received the brief filed by the attorney as the basis for the suit, I reviewed them and thought that we could negotiate a lot of it out, because some of it conflicted with the plan the Advisor from the Corrections Division had given us.

I sent the suit to him and asked him to come to the jail. A few days later he came and inspected the jail, he said that the changes requested by the attorney were good ideas – and better than he had advised and that we should make the changes.

In the plan he had given us we were to spend a great deal of money making changes that the attorney was opposed to, if we had made those changes then it would have been for naught. Even some of those that were made by my predecessor had to be scrapped.

I challenged him about his prior inspections and the plan he had devised for us, he said something like "the inspections were not meant to make it hard on Counties, especially smaller ones like yours." So his inspections were just scans. The jail was clean, inmates well fed, (among other things) so he didn't see any point in putting the jail down.

While that was 'nice' it proved detrimental. I was less than happy.

We started to negotiate with the attorney. In the process we ended up making our jail a '72-hour holding facility' so it didn't have to follow all the guidelines and requirements the attorney was trying to put through. Part of our salvation was we were able to negotiate that an inmate could sign a waiver and remain in our facility for a longer term than 72 hours – for them it was a jail.

For those that thought they could wrangle a get out of jail card by not signing – and were too dangerous or in otherwise scored too high of a point we took them to another jail, adjoining our county – Hood River, Oregon just to the west of us or Klickitat County Washington which was across the Columbia River – but adjoining Wasco County.

That was an important fact. Oregon laws allowed a Sheriff to hold a pre-trial inmate in a jail of an adjoining county. We had several adjoining counties – Hood River County in Hood River; Clackamas County in Oregon City; Marion County in Salem; Lynn County in Albany; Jefferson County in Madras; Wheeler county (which didn't have a jail they housed some of their prisoners with us and other 'adjoining counties;) Sherman County, that also housed their prisoners with us: and across the river in Klickitat County in Goldendale.

As and aside, just so I knew what counties were adjacent I looked at the Oregon map. Several years later I was at the State Fair, manning the county booth, talking with an established 'expert' about Oregon. I told him there were seven counties, in Oregon, that touched Wasco. He told me no, there were only six.

Later, after I left the booth, I walked over to the Oregon booth and he was there. I had him pull out a map of Oregon showing the counties. He had to admit I was right – the people manning the booth enjoyed the discourse, later they told me that no one had ever 'one upped him.'

While some of those couldn't have helped us and most were just too far away in both distance and driving time, (they might be adjoining counties, but to get to their county seats and therefore their jails would take several hours – it wasn't a straight line) we did have some options and once the word got out we had few who refused to sign the waiver. As I said we treated our inmates with respect and they were near their relatives.

We signed a long term contract for beds with Union County in LaGrande, Ore where we sent convicted misdemeanants. They were about 200 miles away and not adjoining, but didn't have to be when the inmate was convicted.

They had been sued by the same attorney and were in compliance, so we knew that our prisoners couldn't sue Union County.

I knew from the beginning that we needed a new facility and had started planning on how we could get a bond levy through the citizens of our county to build one shortly after taking Office.

While that first year, with the hundreds of extra hours dealing with the problems, including personnel, in the jail was a real challenge for me, it continued to be an issue and a burden I had to deal with my entire time in Office.

It required literally untold thousands of hours I would have preferred and needed to be doing something else.

I may write about some of what we went through before we were able to pass a bond levy for a regional jail, as I retired, at a later time.