By Andrew Seidman
The Philadelphia Inquirer
GLOUCESTER COUNTY — A Gloucester County plan to outsource its adult male inmate population to other counties - making it the only county in New Jersey without its own jail - has come under fire from public defenders who say they can’t possibly provide adequate representation to clients housed in jails an hour or more away.
The lawyers, like the Gloucester County corrections officers whose jobs are in limbo, say the plan was hatched in secrecy by the freeholder board without consulting them. The ACLU says the plan also violates moral and practical imperatives to keep inmates close to their families.
“Their unilateral actions threaten to put the criminal justice system in Gloucester County into chaos,” said Dale Jones, an assistant public defender in Trenton who supervises regional defender offices in eight counties, including Gloucester and Cumberland.
“How are Gloucester County attorneys going to have meaningful contact with clients if they’re housed in different counties?” Jones said.
The county Office of the Public Defenders said the freeholders had not informed it of the plan, which was announced March 9 and passed four days later at a heated meeting where dozens of corrections officers and residents pleaded with the board to at least table the resolution and involve them in the negotiations.
Responding to charges that the board hastily arranged the plan without soliciting public input, Freeholder Director Robert M. Damminger said at the March 13 meeting that the board had been working on ways to trim the budget for years.
Under the shared-services agreement, Gloucester County will ship at least 100 of its 270 male inmates in Woodbury to the Cumberland County jail in Bridgeton, about 38 miles away.
The freeholders are also in talks with Salem County to send inmates there, and they may court other counties as well.
The freeholder board is casting the plan, to take effect July 1, as a boon to taxpayers. Housing the inmates costs $28 million annually, and outsourcing will save $10 million a year through reduced salaries, operating expenses, and benefits, among other things, the board says.
The county will reduce its staff of 120 corrections officers and 37 support staffers to 33 positions. It expects to pay $10 million annually to the other counties through at least 2023.
The county outsourced its juvenile and female inmate populations to Camden, Salem, and Cumberland Counties in 2009 and 2010.
Meeting with those inmates has been difficult, Jones said, but there are fewer of them than there are adult male inmates.
Under the new plan, the Sheriff’s Department will transport arrestees to the new host counties, and the remaining corrections officers will transport inmates to and from court.
Debra Sellitto, Gloucester County spokeswoman, said the county will bring inmates back to Woodbury at attorneys’ request. “We will make every effort to accommodate them,” she said.
Jeffrey Wintner, deputy public defender in the Gloucester County office, said that such an arrangement would alleviate some of his concerns, but that he was deeply skeptical the county would be able to transport the high volume of clients his office may need to see on any given day.
“I think the chances that it will happen are somewhere between slim and none,” he said. “How would they bring 30 people up on a Thursday morning, and where would they bring them to? If the jail is closed down, I don’t know where they would be.”
Jones said the Public Defenders Office, which has eight lawyers, was considering litigation; three unions representing Gloucester County corrections officers have already filed suit against the freeholder board for failing to include alternative employment plans in the agreement.
Statewide, Jones said, 85 percent of inmates are represented by public defenders, though he did not have specific data on Gloucester County.
Meeting with clients in Cumberland, Salem, and possibly other locales will be “difficult to impossible for us to do,” Wintner said.
The problem is compounded by the fact that visitation schedules are different at each jail, and lawyers have other obligations to appear in court or work in the office, Wintner said.
Logistically, courts may be forced to hold some hearings by teleconference, he said. “If you had an issue before the court, and that issue was going to determine your liberty,” he said, “you would prefer to be present, face to face with the people making those decisions rather than on television.”
The possible implications for inmates are “particularly worthy of examination in this year, the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s commitment to a right to counsel,” said Alexander Shalom, policy lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, referring to the court’s landmark March 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright.
“It’s a disrespect to the legacy of Gideon to say, ‘Sure, you have a right to counsel - if your lawyer has two hours to get there.’ ”
A large body of data, Shalom said, also suggests maintaining connections with their families helps inmates better reintegrate into society and reduces recidivism.
He added that removing pretrial detainees - 35 to 50 in Gloucester’s jail, according to the county - from their families might exacerbate a chronic problem in the criminal justice system: Innocent people often plead guilty because the alternative frequently means sitting in jail for a year awaiting trial.
“When you add to the mix that that year in jail is removed from everyone you’ve known,” Shalom said, “it increases the pressure [to plead guilty] by raising the stakes for staying in.”
And part of the plan already appears to be unraveling: Though the Gloucester freeholder board tried to allay concerns about layoffs by saying corrections officers would be transferred to other county jails, officials in Cumberland and Salem say that those discussions weren’t part of the negotiations and that the counties were more likely to hire local personnel to accommodate the influx of inmates.
The freeholders have pledged to help the Gloucester officers find jobs.
“I’m sure there’s going to be a transition and some growing pains,” Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean Dalton said. “But it seems like they’re prepared to do what’s necessary to make this work.”
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