By Christine Byers
STL Today
CLAYTON — It takes so much overtime to manage the overcrowded St. Louis County Justice Center that some workers say it’s as if the jailers become the jailed.
“I feel like an inmate half the time because I’m locked up just as much as they are,” quipped Corrections Officer Natasha Crockett. Some overtime is mandatory, as supervisors struggle with staff-inmate ratios. The population inside is growing but the number of admissions and bookings is not. The problem is that the average length of incarceration has increased to 52 days, from 43 in 2011.
St. Louis County government leaders are now proposing to pay private attorneys to expedite cases they believe are languishing in an overloaded public defender system. But the plan is drawing sharp criticism from St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, who has long discounted public defenders’ lament of overwork, and suggested that the money might better be spent on electronic and GPS monitoring of inmates or more prosecutors.
“If I would have known the county had an extra $300,000 laying around, I would have put in to hire three or four more prosecutors,” he said.
Full story: St. Louis County says paying for inmate lawyers might ease jail crowding