By James Osborne
The Philadelphia Inquirer
CAMDEN, Pa. — From a 16th-floor conference room overlooking downtown Camden and the Delaware River, jail warden Eric Taylor yesterday described an incident two weeks ago at the place he spends most of his workday.
An elevator at the Camden County Correctional Facility broke down with two correctional officers and about six inmates inside. For a half-hour, until the problem was fixed, the correctional officers and inmates were left in a potentially volatile standoff.
The officers “were OK, but this is a security risk,” said Taylor.
“We’re working in a difficult atmosphere. Four people stuck in a cell built for two.”
The state of disrepair and overcrowding at the downtown jail is a problem county officials say they have been working on solving almost since the facility opened in 1987. The average daily inmate population for October is 1,653, well over the 1,083 inmates the jail is certified to hold.
A recent analysis of the jail by criminal justice consultants Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates recommended building a new jail and bringing in a contractor to run it, and officials plan to come to a decision within a year, said Camden County Administrator Ross Angilella.
“This is the number-one fiscal issue we have,” he said of the jail’s $55.2 million budget, up 35 percent from 2004. “But there’s a lot of discussion that has to happen first. Part of the reason we’re in the situation we’re in now is that when they built this jail, there was almost no study done.”
PBA Local 351, which represents almost all Camden County corrections officers, is opposing any move toward privatization and plans to challenge the county in court if officials move ahead.
“I’m not going to take a job for lower money and less pension,” said union president Robert Parker.
Another difficult issue is clearing up the bureaucracy in Camden County’s criminal justice system. Solve that, and inmates move out more quickly, easing the overcrowding problem.
In a separate report completed in April, also by Pulitzer/Bogard, consultants cataloged a lengthy list of inefficiencies at all levels, from the speed at which police complete their reports, to prosecutors’ failing to share information with public defenders, and the speed at which the courts move cases through their dockets.
That report, commissioned by plaintiff’s attorneys in a federal class-action lawsuit against Camden County and now being distributed by county officials, has not met with universal acclaim from police officials, prosecutors, and court personnel.
“The idea of police consulting with prosecutors before suspects go to jail, it’s not realistic,” said Jason Laughlin, a spokesman for Camden County Prosecutor’s Office. “What we agree on is, there are ways we can cooperate to reduce the [jail] population. The big caveat in our office is to do it without reducing public safety. . . . You don’t want to be the prosecutor who turns a person loose and they go and do something horrible.”
Changes in the system are under way.
The jail expanded its video court system - the suspect is on camera and the judge presides from a remote location - and is looking toward arraigning suspects in the jail’s booking area.
And the Prosecutor’s Office now conducts a daily screening of the previous day’s arrests to determine if it is going to recommend immediate release or a bail hearing.
Angilella believes the changes are already having an impact.
From July to October, the jail’s average daily inmate population dropped from 1,807 to 1,653, although that’s not necessarily outside the expected statistical fluctuation.
“There are up and downs, but from June to October you usually see a spike,” Angilella said.
In addressing day-to-day operations at the jail, the question that bothers Taylor is how to maintain the current level of corrections officers, among whom high turnover rates and frequent sick days are standard.
Before leaving a news briefing yesterday, Taylor, who came to Camden five years ago after a long career in the New York City Department of Corrections, made one request.
“I need my officers to hear I’m their advocate,” he said. “Their relatives read a lot of things about what’s wrong with the jail, and we’re working on that. But the officers do an excellent job under very stressful conditions.”
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