Associated Press
MINOT, N.D. — Officials at the Ward County Sheriff’s Department say they’re making progress toward meeting state requirements ordered after the death of an inmate.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in December found that the jail had not been giving inmates medical physicals as required, had not completed required training for some officers and was operating without sufficient staff.
Sheriff Steve Kukowski told the County Commission this week that the jail is on schedule to have all employees trained by July. Administrators also are working on a contract with Trinity Health to obtain nursing services five days per week, an increase from the current two days per week.
“We have set some goals that ... we want to accomplish to go above and beyond what the Department of Corrections has mandated to us,” Kukowski said.
A state compliance monitor has visited the jail and will be working out of the facility beginning next week, according to Capt. Bob Barnard.
The jail also began moving some inmates to other facilities last fall at the state’s direction, to reduce crowding that has occurred as the population grows in the city on the edge of the booming western oil patch. The county spent nearly $67,000 housing inmates elsewhere during the last three months of 2014, and estimates of the cost this year are as high as $711,000.
County voters in 2012 approved a half percent sales tax to generate up to $40 million in bonding for a 50-cell jail expansion. They will decide in a special election Feb. 24 whether to approve up to $41 million in additional borrowing, to increase the jail expansion project to 100 new cells.