Lake County jail, courthouse need more room
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POLSON — Lake County Detention Center, the county’s jail, is so full that people who need to serve jail time have to call in daily to see if there’s room.
According to Lake County Undersheriff Dan Yonkin, the jail was built by Lake County and is overseen by the county commissioners.
“It’s their facility, we staff it,” Yonkin said.
Detention Sergeant Lonnie Erickson said an average of 10 people call Detention Control Officer Gus Bliese every day. Bliese sees where we are for capacity in the 42-bed facility, he said.
“Ninety nine percent of the time, we don’t have room,” Erickson said, so their names are entered in the book containing names of people who need to serve time.
“I guarantee there are 50 who should be calling,” Erickson said.
“We have people who have been calling for a year,” LCSO Captain Luc Mathias said, adding that sometimes those people go back to court and say they haven’t been able to serve their time.
Mathias is in charge of detention and dispatch. He’s worked at the LCSO for almost 20 years, first as a deputy, then sergeant and now captain.
“On an average day we have at least 45 to 48 inmates,” Mathias said.
Some of the inmates then sleep on “boats.”
The boats are temporary beds, like trundle beds, with a mattress in them, and inmates sleep on a boat either on the floor in a cell or in the recreation room.
But the temporary beds stress the people in the cell, Erickson said, so detention staff does their best to move people along.
The two sergeants — Erickson and Ken Maughan — make the decision considering: Is there enough room? Does the person need a solitary cell? Is he or she a threat to the jail population?
The are only four solitary cells for prisoners who come in intoxicated, high or on the fight.
Sometimes inmates in solitary cells have mental health problems or have disciplinary issues in the jail.
“Oftentimes they are full. We have to pull people out (of solitary cells) who were in fights (with other inmates),” Lake County Undersheriff Dan Yonkin explained.
With the female inmate population skyrocketing, the jail now has six more beds that are dedicated to women prisoners.
“We do lock up a number of people who are in mental health crisis,” Yonkin said, when they become a danger to themselves or others, but they don’t really belong in jail. “The jail has to take them; the hospital can’t.”
The Lake House, a mental health crisis facility, to be built south of Providence St. Joseph’s Medical Center, will be of great assistance to the Lake County Detention Center, Yonkin said.
“We’re really optimistic about that. We’re going to put people in the right place, not just warehouse them.”
At the jail, “We kind of have a three-fold problem,” Yonkin said.
One, there is not enough room. When the jail doesn’t have room, the people who need to come to jail — with warrants or because they have done something that puts them behind bars — are often turned away.
In the justice system, judges, attorneys, law clerks and legal secretaries are working hard to handle cases. When judges hand down sentences, it breaks down at the jail, because there isn’t space for them, Yonkin said.
“The one exception to the jail cap, the hard and fast exception,” Yonkin said, “is someone arrested for family member assault. The law mandates that we have to have room so we have to find room.”
“The problem is there has got to be some accountability. We just don’t have the space for people to have the accountability to behave,” Erickson said.
Law enforcement has to make choices, too. Yonkin said,” I can’t eject felony people from the jail so misdemeanor people can sit off a couple of days.”
He said the LCSO does try to make space in the jail by not housing Montana State Prison inmates waiting to go to prison.
“But if someone does something wrong and needs to see the inside of a jail cell, we don’t meet that need,” Yonkin said.
Plans for a Lake County Courthouse remodel and more beds for the jail sounds good to Yonkin. In the best of all possible scenarios, he would like to see 100 beds in the jail, which currently holds 46.
Mathias agreed.
“It would be nice to have a minimum of 100 beds, with more solitary cells,” he said.
While all the beds wouldn’t be used immediately, “it’s highly unlikely the community is shrinking,” Yonkin said.
The extra beds could be used to generate income by housing inmates for Flathead and Missoula County or the Montana State Prison.
He said he doesn’t see building a facility that isn’t going to be big enough in 10 years as a good idea.
“Given legislative laws, keeping people accountable for DUIs and certain felonies, we’re going to have to have room and be able to hold people,” Yonkin explained.
With 20 detention officers on staff now, Captain Luc Mathias said he has a good staff.
If the jail expands, he said, “The more inmates you put in there, the more officers you are going to need. It always comes down to money.”
Lake County Commissioner Bill Barron said the detention facility also needs a new kitchen, a medical facility, two padded cells, plus extra new cells since space for the jail inmates is only half of what the jail needs.
“The kitchen puts out 150 meals a day, and it’s just not adequate,” Barron said.
Currently the pantry area shares space with the wires and circuits of the courthouse’s telephone system.
And when the detention center’s doctor comes to visit patients at jail, detention officers have to remove an inmate from a solitary cell so the doctor can perform an exam.
The jail also needs rooms for prisoners on suicide watch and rubber rooms where inmates can’t hurt themselves.
Office space for the detention sergeants is a tiny room with only enough room for a desk, a chair and a computer. A commercial washer and dryer take up most of the space in the detention staff’s office.
According to Barron it’s not only the jail that needs more room; the Lake County Courthouse needs remodeling and expaing. The building is bursting at its seams.
The Lake County Attorney’s Office file room is filled with filing cabinets, all topped with towering stacks of files that don’t have a home. There is no conference room for the attorneys in their suite of offices.
Across the hall, a small conference room has been converted into office space so the entire courthouse has one conference room, Barron said. While it’s a large room and can be divided with a sliding door into two rooms, it’s not soundproof and people in one side can hear what’s being said by folks on the other.
For both district court judges and a justice court judge, there is only one jury room. Barron said there have been instances of all three courts holding jury trials at the same time making it hard to find places for the juries to consider their cases.
When Judge Deborah Kim Christopher joined Judge C. B. McNeil as a district judge, the solution to offices was to divide the original office in half. With no conference room and no reception area with chairs, the executive assistants, law clerk and the judges are stuffed into the space.
Justice Court Joey Jayne’s quarters are also cramped. Her office is small, and her four feorstaffers are shoehorned into an office that is running out of filing space.
That doesn’t even count the courtrooms. With one district courtroom, when both district judges are presiding, one must hold court in the large conference room.
When the Montana legislature in 1997 created a second Judicial District 20 Judge, Lake County was supposed to furnish an additional courtroom and office space for the second judge, Barron said.
In 2004 or so, the state contacted commissioners and said, “You have to do this,” he said.
So they pulled together a committee which put together plans for an addition to the courthouse, which would have doubled its size, adding courtrooms and jail space, but Barron said the estimated $17 million price tag killed the project.
Before former Judge C.B. McNeil retired from office in 2013, he signed an order Lake County has to comply with for an additional courtroom.
The choices are either build another building or remodel the courthouse or a combination thereof, Barron said.
The commissioners are trying to form a committee and have done some preliminary meetings with an architect. One plan they are looking at is remodeling the building kitty corner from the courthouse on the west corner of First Avenue W and Fifth Avenue and moving all the county offices there, with the exception of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, dispatch and the jail.
Although it’s all in the planning process, if this plan is chosen the LCSO could move to the first floor of the courthouse, the jail could be expanded, and another court room would be built on the third floor, possibly by building over the atrium.
