Bradley County Commissioners have put animal control issues behind them and took the opportunity Monday to turn their attention to inmate issues.
Commission Vice Chairman Jeff Yarber urged his colleagues to think of ways to decrease the recidivism rate in Bradley County.
The vice chairman commended the Bradley County Juvenile Justice Center for instituting alternative sentencing and implementing other programs to reduce recidivism among teenage offenders.
Camelot, which offers community-based family counseling and prevention services, has an office within the juvenile center.
He said the number of juveniles on probation has declined from 250 to about 120.
Meth is again on the rise. Five of 18 juveniles in the Juvenile Justice Center are there for meth-related offenses, he said.
Turning from juvenile to adult incarceration, Mr. Yarber said they’re looking at jail overcrowding and 7,000 outstanding warrants.
“We tend to, as a society, to lock them up and throw away the keys,” he said. “But we’ve got to look at alternative sentencing. We have to look at some true rehabilitative measures. … We need 1,600 beds a week in the United States to maintain the prison population. At some point in time everybody’s going to be a prisoner or a corrections officer.”
The vice chairman said alternative sentencing and other programs are often equated with liberalism, “but you can be a conservative and still think there is something wrong with the way we’re doing things.”
He was not speaking of violent offenders but of “generational offenders” in families in which incarceration is a legacy.
“I’d like to start looking throughout the United States to see what kind of programs are working,” Mr. Yarber said.
Commissioner Dan Rawls said there will always be crime until people have opportunities.
“You can build all the jails you want to build, none of it’s going to matter. You can lock them up for as long as you think you want to lock them up,” he said. “We have to incentivize children to not only depend on others, but to be responsible for themselves.
“The answer here is not to spend millions of dollars on jails and create an industry unto itself, which is what we’ve done, and this industry promotes the increased number of laws so they can lock up more people so they can make more money. Do we not see the problem with this whole situation?”
Vice Mayor Yarber, who was a juvenile probation officer for six years, said other reasons are that there is a disconnect between parents and teachers and the use of social media. He said that as it is now, every dollar spent in jails goes to fix problems. “You’re just putting out fires now,” he said. He believes there is a need to start education programs about crime and drug awareness in elementary schools.
Bradley County is doing something they believe will help youth who get in trouble to get back on track. Right now, the County jail holds 407 people, and there are currently over 7,000 outstanding warrants in the county. Instead of building another jail, a workhouse will be built for at-risk youth.
Officials of this minimum security workhouse will partner with industries to provide jobs for those sentenced to serve time there. People will have to pay to stay in the facility with payment being taken from their paychecks thereby reducing costs for the county. And, when someone is released they will leave with a job.
This alternative system is seen as one way to get a handle on the broken system. The new facility is scheduled to break ground in January and will have around 125 beds.
On another topic, Commissioners Charlotte Peak and Howard Thompson said they received complaints about the placement of the traffic light on Minnis Road. He asked that the Road Committee study how much it would cost to either relocate the existing light or install a new one