Columbia County Sheriff Clay Whittle says the detention center is not full despite moves by a judge to reconsider bond denials to “address our local jail population.”
In a letter to attorneys last week, Superior Court Judge J. Wade Padgett said he was amending the court schedule to add sentencing hearings and expedite probation revocations.
“In Columbia County, we are experiencing a temporary situation which necessitates an immediate response from the courts,” Judge Padgett said in Tuesday’s letter. “I am asking lawyers and their staff on all sides respond with extraordinary effort and attitude to help us.”
Sheriff Whittle says the number of inmates are reaching a level that adds medical costs, mainly from many probation violators. The magic number is 338. That is when an extra nurse is needed.
“When they are put in the jail, we have to fund them, we have to feed them, and we have to pay for their medical services, which is extremely expensive,” the sheriff said. “This is simply a housekeeping measure to try and relieve that number and get it down below 338, to reduce daily medical costs.”
But the jail is not full, crime is not increasing and inmates are not sleeping on the floor.
“We are not overcrowded. We are not overcrowded! Absolutely not,” he said. “We are OK here.”
The Appling facility, built two decades ago, can currently hold 356 people without pulling in extra mattresses for inmates to sleep on the floor. It had numbers in the low 330s on Friday.
A new pod was added in 2012, and the commission has approved financing for a new 72-bed pod that will add more room in the next few years to address the county’s growing population.
On Friday, Sheriff Whittle tackled the perception that the need to reduce the jail population indicates higher crime levels in Columbia County.
“Our calls for service are definitely going up,” he said. “But our crime rate is going down. That is because we work at that every single day.”
The expanded jail population dates back to COVID when the judicial system was shut down and most jurisdictions got a backlog overnight, Sheriff Whittle said. In 2021, Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill allowing Columbia County’s split from the Augusta Judicial Circuit, further slowing hearings as the two offices transferred files between counties.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Whittle credits Judge Padgett with finding new ways to quicken the process with WebEx hearings from the jail, moving cases faster and saving the sheriff’s office thousands in transportation and security costs to get them to court. The jail has three rooms to handle hearings over a Zoom-style camera hookup.
“Judges use it weekly, levering technology to get the job done quicker and easier,” the sheriff said. “That is Judge Padgett being proactive.”
The public doesn’t have to worry about them letting out dangerous criminals to shrink the jail population, Sheriff Whittle said. He said not everyone deserves to stay in jail, including people who simply didn’t pay a fine and violated their probation.
“We are simply at the cleanup stage,” the sheriff said.
Judge Padgett’s letter to local attorneys, dated May 2, 2023:
