On Oct. 4, Sheriff Richard Roundtree accepted a request by Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson to tour the Charles B. Webster Detention Center and discuss on-going problems at the facility.
District 3 Commissioner Catherine McKnight, District 6 Commissioner Tony Lewis and District 1 Commissioner Jordan Johnson joined the mayor, sheriff and his command staff for the tour, which took about two hours.
Prior to the formal tour, invitees were shown two tables full of metal pieces where the inmates had used portions of the lighting housing to transform them into “shanks,” lethal weapons, that is.
READ MORE: Column: A tale of two jails, part two
The entire tour party was kept close together and surrounded by taser wielding guards for protection and safety.
“This jail was designed to be a medium security facility, but only about 50 inmates out of the current population are here on misdemeanor charges. The rest are all here on violent felonies. Currently, we have 85 people here charged with murder,” Roundtree said.
The Webster facility has space for 1,050 beds, however that number is exceeded by 50 to 200 additional inmates almost on a daily basis, leaving some to sleep on the concrete floors.
According to Roundtree, while some inmates are booked and released on their own recognisance, the average stay for an inmate is four years due to a number of factors.
“Covid really slowed things down, with the court system getting backlogged for almost two years and that frustrated everybody because there was nothing anyone could do about it,” Roundtree said.
Cpt. Scott Gay, who is over court services, says that the District Attorney’s Office is moving three to four cases a week, but for every case that trickles out, another deskload of cases pops up. Richmond County made 190 arrests in the 12-day period of Sept. 21 through Oct.4.
Making matters worse is the fact that once an inmate is convicted, the jail has to wait for a bed at the state penitentiary to become available.
According to Col. Calvin Chew, who is in charge of the jail, his staff tries constantly to have inmates transferred to other facilities in other counties; however, Richmond County inmates have become so notorious for violence that smaller jails are not equipped to house them.
“We reach out, but the bottom line is that no one wants them. We have one inmate we transferred to McDuffie County and one in Jefferson County, mainly, the other jails do not want our inmates coming in and tearing their jail up,” Chew said.
Evidence is everywhere in the various pods of inmate vandalization. A phone bank in one pod only had one inmate-use telephone; the others had clearly been ripped from the wall and used to attempt to break out the glass securing the pod.
The several-inch-thick glass looks as if it had taken shots from a 9mm weapon.
In one pod, there was clear evidence of inmates crudely disassembling a light fixture to fashion shanks and one can tell where television sets used to be installed on the wall, but all of them were ripped down and destroyed by inmates, according to Roundtree.
“We used to have these kiosks where inmates could get snacks, and they tore every last one of them apart,” Roundtree said.
The Augusta Commission has released $300,000 to fix locks throughout the cell blocks and will likely consider funding a new pod with the next SPLOST. A new pod will likely cost around $34 million to build.
However, according to Chief Deputy Patrick Clayton, a face-lift on the facility is not going to be enough. Currently, the jail, which needs 40 deputies at all times to maintain a safe environment and is about half staffed with all officers on the force, including command staff having to pull jail duty.
“We need to be able to hire good, qualified officers, but we can’t pay them $5,000 less per year than other, safer jurisdictions pay. The jail needs staffing. We can fix the building up like brand new, but they will just tear the new building down without a human being constantly watching them,” Clayton said.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
