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Show Customers Nearly Double In Year For New Davis Jail By GARY R. BLODGETT FARMINGTON Davis County's new jail facility is not even one year old and the inmate in-mate population has nearly doubled. Sheriff Brant Johnson John-son disclosed last week. "WE AVERAGED 45 prisoners pris-oners per day when the new jail addition was completed last February," said Sheriff Johnson. "Now our average enrollment is up to 80-85 per month." He said the new addition provided an additional 60 beds for a total of about 1 10 beds in the old and new facilities facili-ties combined. The second phase of the jail construction and remodeling project will be completed within the next few days. THE REMODELING phase of the project being completed is in the old section of the iail complex, adjacent to the Davis County Courthouse in Farm-ington. Farm-ington. "This will provide two modernized mod-ernized cell blocks which are being brought up to jail standards," stan-dards," the sheriff said. "One cell will hold 12 inmates and the other will facilitate 20 persons. per-sons. They will be used primarily pri-marily for holding persons booked into jail awaiting release re-lease on bail. ALSO INCLUDED in the second phase of construction is the completion of the second floor of the jail which is used for storage of microfilm records re-cords for the county, polygraph poly-graph and investigation rooms for the Sheriffs Department, and offices of the Utah Highway High-way Patrol, Davis, County Council on Aging, and Utah State University Extension Service. He emphasized that although there are a maximum of 1 10 beds, the capacity of the jail is much more because there are no beds in the "drunk tank" or in the holding cells. "WE HAVE had as many as 109 incarcerated in jail at a single time, but only for a matter mat-ter of hours." the sheriff explained. ex-plained. "Thus far, we have had adequate facilities to accommodate inmates but there are times that we have been near capacity." Meanwhile, county commissioners com-missioners are considering an offer for the Davis County Jail to house up to 15 Utah State Prison inmates. "THIS WOULD be a good program because the state has offered to pay $23 per day, or about $126,000 annually, for the privilege of having the county jail house the inmates and relieve an extremely overcrowded over-crowded condition at the state prison," the sheriff said. "Also, the state would pay for all medical costs, transportation, transpor-tation, commissary allowance, etc. That menas that the only cost to the county, in addition to personnel administration, would be cost of meals." HE NOTED that meals cost the county 45 to 65 cents per meal per inmate each day. Sheriff Johnson has asked the commission to allow useage of the surplus of the money from the state for prison pris-on inmate care to be used to hire two deputies and a secretary. sec-retary. "WE NEED these added personnel to adequately staff the jail," said the sheriff. "It requires 20 persons to man the jail and we have only 17 for these positions. So we need the added personnel whether or not state prison inmates are housed here." Sheriff Johnson said cost of meals for the state prison inmates, in-mates, if approved for the county jail, would cost about $10,000 annually, leaving a surplus of about $15,000 ttiat could be used towards hiring of more personnel. "It's money that wasn't previously budgeted so would not be a part of our budget request that is presently being reviewed," he stressed. HE SAID the prison inmates would be "short termers," most of them serving less than V0 days. However, new inmates in-mates would be assigned to the jail periodically over a minimum mini-mum of two years while prison officials improve and enlarge present prison facilities. |