JEFFERSONVILLE — Each cell at the Clementine B. Barthold Juvenile Detention Center for Clark County has a piece of paper with a name stuck to it.
The cells with girls' names are usually in a different room than the ones with boys' names.
When the 14-room facility is full though, like on Wednesday, they can be found side by side.
Clark County’s detention center, based along Meigs Avenue in Jeffersonville, has been full a lot lately, especially for a lower-capacity time of year.
Many of the inmates aren’t even from Clark County, although the ratio fluctuates. On Wednesday, half were. The others came from Floyd, Scott and Harrison counties where there are no juvenile detention facilities.
Recently, though, requests to house kids have been pouring in from all over the south central part of the state.
“I get calls literally every single day,” said Jennifer Snawder, the assistant director of the detention center.
And often, she doesn’t have enough room to accept the kids they’re about.
The increased need from other counties spurred Circuit Court No. 4 Judge Vicki Carmichael and Lyda Abell, the Clark County juvenile detention center’s director, to go before the Clark County Commissioners last week to bring up the possibility of expanding by up to 10 beds.
The commissioners gave them permission to look into the possibility, as long as they don’t spend any money doing so.
The reason behind the increase
An occasional lack of rooms in Clark County’s detention center isn’t uncommon, Snawder said, but demand has picked up in the last month.
In February, the Jackson County Commissioners voted to close down their 28-bed juvenile detention facility after experiencing heavy overcrowding at their adult jail. (The county was consistently seeing over 75 more inmates than the jail was built to handle, according to Jackson County Jail Commander Charlie Murphy). The juvenile detention facility will be transformed into 56 more beds for adult inmates.
The county put a lot of thought into the decision, said Jackson County’s juvenile detention center’s executive director, Steve Redicker.
All out-of-county kids staying at Jackson’s juvenile detention facility had to be transferred by Feb. 28. The detention center had served kids from Jennings, Jefferson, Switzerland, Scott, Washington, Lawrence, Orange and even Crawford and Harrison counties, Redicker said.
Now, those counties need another place to house their juvenile offenders, and Clark County is a close — and desirable — location. The calls that Clark has been receiving recently have come from Washington, Crawford, Orange, Scott and Harrison counties, said Carmichael at last week’s meeting. Before, they typically only came from Floyd, Harrison and occasionally Crawford counties, and the detention center usually only had 10 to 12 kids in its care.
Out-of-county inmates stay in Clark for $100 a day, an amount paid by their home governments to cover the costs of housing them.
It might seem odd that so many of Clark County’s inmates are from outside of the area, but that was the original purpose of the detention center.
The purpose of a (close) detention center
Clark County’s juvenile detention facility was started in 1991 by a former judge, for which the center is a named.
“Judge Barthold, Clementine Barthold, was a huge youth advocate,” said Tracy Keith, an administrator at Clark County’s facility. “And she really was the person that pushed and saw the need for a facility like this, and basically pushed ‘till she got it.”
Barthold envisioned Clark County’s detention center as a regional facility, meaning that it was for counties throughout the area.
Only 22 of Indiana’s 92 counties contain juvenile detention centers, and the closest one to Clark is in Columbus, Ind., although Snawder doesn’t believe that one has maximum security. Beyond that, the nearest ones are located in Dearborn and Johnson counties.
Not every county has to have a juvenile detention center in the opinion of Bill Glick, the former executive director of the now-defunct Indiana Juvenile Justice Task Force. In fact, he thinks that Indiana has enough as it is due to the nature of the juvenile justice system.
The kids in Clark County are the juvenile offenders with the worst charges. On the detention center’s Wednesday roster, inmates were there for everything from possession of a firearm to attempted murder. If a child commits a lesser crime, their county will often try to hold them in other ways: at home or in a youth shelter, for example.
Clark County’s inmates only stay an average of 15 days. They’re often waiting for a final hearing, after which — if found guilty (or “true,” in the case of juvenile court), they might be transferred to one of Indiana’s juvenile correctional facilities, Glick said.
The state is actually trending toward a less institutionalized version of juvenile justice with the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, which Clark County is a part of. JDAI allows for counties to seek out alternatives to incarceration for juvenile offenders, including the at-home and shelter care that Clark County engages in.
There’s still a balance to be struck, though, as some juvenile offenders are either considered a danger to their communities or in danger of living in their own communities, and as such, have to be detained. Others might not have a home life that they can’t safely go back to.
It’s tough on a county if the nearest detention center is far away. Sheriff’s offices have to transport their juveniles to and from the facilities and court, which can cost them money and require officers to travel long distances. Plus, when a child is first detained, they only have 48 hours until their first hearing must be conducted — one of the reasons Floyd County Magistrate Julie Fessel Flanigan likes having a juvenile detention center so close.
“It’s not just nice,” she said. “It’s a safety issue and something that I’m very grateful that we have in Clark County.”
When detention centers are far away, children are also separated from their families and, in some cases, therapists.
And then there’s the general benefit a county receives from having neighbors with secured juvenile offenders.
“There’s no walls around us,” Keith reminded.
Floyd County has occasionally experienced issues with finding spots in Clark County’s detention center for their juvenile offenders. Usually, the county finds an alternative place in the area for their children to stay, Flanigan said, but if desperate, the county could transport an offender to Evansville’s juvenile detention center or swap out a current Floyd County inmate in Clark County with another. That hasn’t had to happen yet, though, Flanigan said.
The feasibility of the project
Despite the utility of Clark County’s detention center, Commissioners' President Jack Coffman isn’t convinced that an expansion is needed.
Sure, there’s a spike in need for spots in the facility, but he’s not sure if it’s serious enough, or if it will last.
“I’m leaving that up to Judge Carmichael and the detention director Miss Able,” he said. “They’re the ones that are doing the research on it, and if they come back and show us more need for that, and they come back with research, then it might be something.”
At the very least, it’s “proactive” and a “good thing” to look into an expansion, he said.
As for funding, Coffman simply said he thinks Clark County is in a better financial position than it has been in other years.
The detention center’s staff thinks they have a plan for expansion that will cause the county the least amount of pain.
The detention center already contains an outdoor recreation area with walls that could be partly replaced by more rooms. The caged courtyard is large enough that the facility would still have the state required amount of recreational space.
Staff are also planning to keep the amount of added-on rooms at or below 10. That way the detention center doesn’t legally have to hire more full-time staff.
Clark County Commissioners also expressed an interest at last week’s meeting in revamping the way the detention center is compensated for housing juvenile offenders from other counties.
Commissioner Bryan Glover discussed the possibility of seeking grants or instating a minimum amount for counties to pay the dentition center regardless of how many juveniles they’re sending to Clark County at one time.
Clark County Attorney Scott Lewis brought up the idea of an interlocal agreement between Clark County and the other counties that use its facility, which would fund the expansion in a more equitable way.
Detention center staff and Carmichael will be looking into that and more before returning to the commissioners with their findings. Currently, they don’t know how much the project would cost.
“I am not opposed to it,” said Commissioner Connie Sellers at last week’s meeting. “But I need to see the figures. I want to see the financials, and I want to see if you come up with an interlocal agreement…”