Dougherty County Jail pretrial release program expected to save tax dollars

ALBANY — A pretrial release program for qualifying inmates, aimed at saving tax dollars and reducing recidivism, began Tuesday at the Dougherty County Jail, according to officials with the Dougherty County Sheriff’s Office.

The pretrial release program will provide a safe and cost-effective alternative to incarceration for non-violent offenders who meet the stringent criteria set forth and overseen by the Pretrial Services Unit, sheriff’s officials said.

“Almost two years ago, Col. John Ostrander, my jail director, came to me with an idea that he felt could be very beneficial to Dougherty County in the future,” Sheriff Kevin Sproul said at a news conference announcing the program kickoff. “We began looking at some systems that were already in place with Hall County and Fulton County. Then, earlier this year, we took a drive over to Muscogee County and observed their pretrial release program. We then started working on a program for Dougherty County.”

According to officials, the goals, objectives and benefits of the Pretrial Services Unit are to save tax dollars, because qualifying defendants are released rather than incarcerated; allow defendants to secure or maintain gainful employment to support their families; allow defendants to maintain family relationships and raise their children; help ensure compliance with court-ordered substance abuse or mental health programming; monitor released pretrial defendants to help ensure compliance with the conditions of release; maintain public safety and ensure appearances in court; and allow for “time served” if a defendant has served sufficient time in pretrial supervision with no need for an additional sentence.

“This pretrial release program will oversee inmates who are currently in jail who qualified to be released and to be under the watchful eye of Deputy (Christina) Cruz and Deputy (Santorear) Wakefield, the two deputies that have put the nuts and bolts of the program together,” Sproul said. “We look at this as a win-win for the citizens of Dougherty County, for the Sheriff’s Office and, most importantly, for the men and women who will be a part of this program. They’ll get to spend time with their families, not lose their jobs and so many other things that come with that.”

According to Sproul, many inmates who are arrested for minor offenses are individuals who cannot afford bond and remain incarcerated until trial.

“We run across inmates that will have small bonds, and these men and women have jobs but are living paycheck to paycheck,” the sheriff said. “They are scraping with all the means they have to survive and to take care of their family. Then they get arrested on a minor charge or misdemeanor, and they can’t post bond. They then sit here on the taxpayer’s dollar.

“There are a lot of cost benefits to this program, but possibly more important is that it keeps the family together. Many children today have no father or mother figures in their life. Many times members of law enforcement are basically raising these kids and trying to correct their behavior problems, which goes back to their moms and dads being incarcerated, losing their jobs and losing everything. It is also very important that people know: Violent offenders and others who are considered a threat to the public safety will not be considered for this program.”

Col. John Ostrander, the jail director, reiterated that the pretrial release service is a positive community program meant to reduce recidivism and is only available to inmates who are deemed not to be a threat to society. And participants in the program must still appear before a judge; thereby the program does not reduce the threat of jail time as a deterrent for criminal behavior.

“It is important to know that every release decision is made by a judge, not by us,” said Ostrander. “All we do is compile the history. We do a risk assessment, assign a level of supervision that we feel is appropriate, and then we make that as a recommendation and take it to the judge for whom that case has been assigned. The judge makes the decision and, unlike most pretrial release programs where the person is released without a supervision component, here we are going to have two deputies that are working basically as caseworkers.

“However, the people who qualify for this program are pretrial, so they haven’t been convicted of anything. They are under that presumption of innocence. If they are convicted, then they would serve their punishment after the fact, which is outside of the scope of this program. The whole point of bringing someone to jail pretrial is to guarantee their presence in court. The deputies in this program will do just that.”

Ostrander emphasized that law enforcement wants the defendant to show up for court, but the ultimate goal is to help qualifying inmates become productive members of society, not wards of the state.

“We don’t want them back,” said Ostrander. “We want them to show up to court, but after that we want them to be successful and living a life outside this jail. Other counties that we have seen with a pretrial release program similar to ours were successful at releasing numbers equal to about 10 percent of their current jail population. If we can have that level of success, with about 700 inmates now, we could anticipate about 70 on pretrial release once it gets up to full capacity.”

According to Ostrander, the number of qualifying cases would vary over time, but considering that it costs, on average, $46 per day to house an inmate, that is a potential savings of $3,220 per day.