By Bob Fowler
Knoxville News-Sentinel
ROANE, Tenn. — One year and one month after it opened, the new Roane County Jail is already overcrowded.
Built to accommodate 172 inmates, the lockup has been over capacity by about 10 prisoners in the past week, Sheriff Jack Stockton said.
“We had been gradually increasing’’ the jail population, Stockton said. “I felt it [the inmate count] would go over 150, but I didn’t expect it would get to 180 so fast.”
The sheriff said he alerted Roane County Executive Ron Woody about the situation Thursday. “I advised the new county executive to be prepared somewhere down the road for a workhouse or a new addition to the facility,” he said. It’s unlikely the county would take any steps soon involving major expenditures given current fiscal restraints, Stockton said.
The sheriff blamed the economic downturn for an uptick in crimes and the surge in the jail population. “I think law enforcement officers are getting more calls to various crimes,” he said.
Stockton said he’s also taking “a more proactive approach to law enforcement” that includes stepped-up efforts to serve outstanding warrants and round up people newly indicted by Roane County grand juries. The new jail is on North Third Street near the Roane County Courthouse in Kingston.It includes a high-tech headquarters for the county’s Office of Emergency Services and new offices for Sheriff’s Department employees.
It replaces an old jail with a 57-inmate capacity that was so routinely overcrowded that it lost state certification in November 2007. Stockton said the old jail wouldn’t be suitable as a workhouse for the county’s minimum-security inmates because it would be “very costly” to bring it up to new building codes.
Copyright 2010 Knoxville News-Sentinel Co.