Stephen Herzog|SHERZOG@NEWS-LEADER.COM
Sheriff Jim Arnott stood at a podium to announce he would stop taking inmates on municipal warrantsand thathe could no longer "release the burglars, thecar thieves" to house people "riding a skateboard down the sidewalk."
Springfield Mayor Bob Stephens followed with his own press conference to say how the "fabric of our community (was being) destroyed."
The brash language surrounding the local jail dispute does little to inform the public of what's actually happening.
However, soon after these public addresses, Springfield sued Greene County and the sheriff.
The court filings, from both sides,say much more than officials do, and provide an overview of a decades-old problem that’s reached a tipping point.
It describes an argument, with roots back as far as 1997, between the parties.
The suit documents recount failed attempts to reconcile the problem around 2002.
And it explains decisions made in 2015 when the jaillegally reached "capacity."
The filings even showhow relations between the sides have become frigid enough that they can't even agree on what to call the jail.
Two decades of cooperation and agitation can be described by explaining the events of three crucial dates.
June 1997
In November of that year, Greene County voters approved a law enforcement sales tax to fund several things, including the jail.This all started, basically, in 1997.The city and county entered into anagreement to construct and operate the current jail. The status of that agreement continues to beone of the first points of contention in the current argument.
The city, in its lawsuit,argues that agreement should standand that Sheriff Arnott is violating the agreement by refusing municipal prisoners.
In court documents, the city says, “the parties agreed that the jail would accept and house, with limited exceptions, all Springfield Municipal prisoners and that the funding for housing the Springfield Municipal prisoners would consist solely of the proceeds collected from the (law enforcement sales) tax…”
The sheriff’s legal response denies that statement.
“The 1997 Agreement actually says that the ‘Sheriff shall accept all municipal, county or federal prisoners brought to the jail, in accordance with established policy and procedures,’” it says. “Sheriff Arnott has set policies and procedures for accepting municipal prisoners pursuant to the agreement and Missouri law.”
The sheriff says the jail is so full that he has to turn someone away, and that his only options are people arrested on municipal warrants.
The city says, in the documents, that the sheriff’s duty to accept municipal prisoners “is independent of and is not conditioned upon the total number of prisoners accepted by the Sheriff and housed in the City-County Jail.”
Basically, the city says it doesn't matter if the jail is full. The sheriff still has to take its inmates.
The sheriff says that asks him to violate state law. Throughout legal filings, Arnott argues Missouri law mandates he take all federal and state prisoners, and only municipal prisoners when there is room.
There is significant back and forth about when Springfield has paid fees to the sheriff for housing municipal inmates. There’s also an argument about whether the city should have to.
In its court filing, the city says the 1997 agreement indicates jail operations are to be paid from the law enforcement sales tax passed the same year.
Arnott, in his response, says neither the city nor county has the power to operate or direct operation of the jail — that's the job of the sheriff. He says, on the other hand, the sheriff can't direct tax revenue. Basically, there's not one person that has the authority to carry out what the agreement calls for.
“To the extent the 1997 Agreement states Greene County will operate the jail; it is beyond the scope of powers of the Sheriff, City or County, and therefore, that portion of the Agreement which requires the County to operate the jail, is void and unenforceable,” it says.
The city cites state law that says an inter-governmental agreement can determine the use of tax revenue and that “all revenue received from such tax shall be distributed in accordance with said agreement for so long as the tax remains in effect or until the agreement is modified by mutual agreement of the parties.”
Arnott’s legal response is that the agreement should be void because a sheriff never has legal authority to “contract for collection or division of tax money."
December 2002
When the current jail opened in 2001, it was expected to be large enough to house a growing inmate population for a decade. Instead, it reached capacity late the next year.
The county commissioned a report in 2002 to find solutions.
That study, conducted by the Institute for Law and Policy Planning, is commonly referred to as the Kalmanoff Report, named after the director of the institute, Alan Kalmanoff.
Reactions to the report varied, but it essentially argued that building a bigger jail wasn’t a solution — and in fact had recently contributed to the problem. It was called a case of, "if you build it, they will come."
Instead, the study suggested better arrest standards, promoting more instances of cite and release, rather thanarrest and booking.
The report suggested a "criminal justice coordinating committee" and establishing a pretrial release program. Both those suggestions were adopted by county leaders.
One of the goals was to change the average jail stay from 10 days to six days, allowing a greater number of inmates to pass through the system.
The issue was managed for several years after, but the average daily jail population exploded just a couple of years ago.
One of the tricky things about talking about space at the jail is that the facility is, in a way, always over capacity. There are almost always more people in custody than are in the jail.
Greene County pays to house inmates to jails in other counties, so refusing inmates because the jail is full essentially means attempting to limit the number of inmates out of county, which is costly.
Arnott has previously told the News-Leader that revenue from the law enforcement sales tax is not sufficient to run the jail. So every inmate that comes through the doors makes the county’s and sheriff’s budget a little tighter.
April 3, 2015
For almost 20 years, the city and county have been fighting over jail funding and that 1997 agreement.
But the problem reached a boiling point on April 3,2015.
Court records say an inspection not long before that date, conducted by a Springfield fire marshal, found that there were safety and capacity concerns at the jail.
Until that point, Arnott simply fit as many inmates as he could, while trying to maintain safety. The fire marshal’s report gave a real number – 601.
Arnott had been housing more inmates than that on a regular basis, he previously told the News-Leader.
“In the report…it was determined by the Springfield Fire Marshal that the jail exceeded the maximum occupancy for its current condition,” Arnott’s response says. “Thereafter, Sheriff Arnott ceased taking municipal prisoners and started taking other prisoners to facilities in other counties.”
The answer in his filings indicates Arnott chose two short-term solutions to the capacity problem – shipping more out and refusing those on municipal warrants.
While capacity is a real concern for jail management, finances are another.
That's because different kinds of inmates have different effects on the bottom line.
State and municipal inmates are already tough on the budget, just because there's generally not enough funding to handle the heavy load.
Inmates that are sent out of county are even worse, because of fees the county must pay to other jails and the cost of transporting those inmates.
Federal prisoners, however, are a different story. The federal government pays the sheriff to house its inmates, and it pays more than what it costs Greene County to house them. Essentially, federal prisoners are profitable.
The city argues in its filing that the sheriff previously agreed to house 35 federal inmates but now routinely houses more than 100.
The city says the sheriff stopped taking municipal inmates so he couldtake more financially beneficial federal prisoners.
Arnott says he has no control over the number of federal prisoners —that he’s legally required to take as many as are brought to him.
What about the future?
Both the city and county have to find short term solutions to deal with the ever-growing number of inmates.
Both sides also need long-term solutions to that problem.
The result of the lawsuit doesn’t fully solve either problem —there would still be too many people for the jail —but it could certainly change current operations for Springfield police and costs for the Greene County Sheriff’s Office.
It's difficult to imagine improved relations until the suit is put to bed.
In court filings, the city calls the jail the Consolidated County-Municipal Justice Center, or the City-County jail for short. The sheriff’s legal response makes note of that language each time it comes up in the petition.
It says the agreement “does not refer to the subject jail as the ‘City-County jail’ and the City of Springfield’s reference to the jail facility as the ‘City-County jail’ is false and misleading.”
If officials are searching for an easy victory, perhaps they could settle on a name for the jail.
