By Stephen Schmidt
The Gazette
IOWA CITY — A lot of drunken rowdiness goes on downtown on a regular basis.
But don’t just blame the students. A study of Johnson County public intoxication arrests released Friday by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office showed that while 86 percent of public intoxication arrests take place in downtown Iowa City, only a little more than one-third of them are University of Iowa or Kirkwood Community College students.
“That tells me that two-thirds are coming from somewhere else to use (Iowa City) as a party location,” said Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek. “They make bad decisions and then get themselves into trouble.” Pulkrabek said the study was yet another conducted by former University of Iowa professor John Neff and was intended to show how much cost the jail takes on as a result of these arrests using 25-week sample of jail booking data from Sept. 1, 2006, to Feb. 25, 2007.
Pulkrabek pointed out that the majority of offenders arrested for public intoxication spend a little more than 8 hours incarcerated, and therefore are not the primary cause of overcrowding at the Johnson County Jail.
“There’s still this belief in the public that the jail is full of drunken college kids,” Pulkrabek said. “This study goes a long way to show that this is simply not the case.” He instead attributed this overcrowding to violent offenders and others who are serving long criminal sentences.
“Those are the people that are causing overcrowding at the jail, and those are the people who were are shipping all over the county and costing us all sorts of money,” Pulkrabek said.
This current fiscal year the jail is on pace to spend more than $1 million on housing inmates out of county and an additional transportation expenses of close to $100,000, according to the sheriff’s department.
Copyright 2008 The Gazette