Expecting it to be full before it opens: Vigo County Sheriff John Plasse said he expects the new jail to reach 80% capacity soon after it opens. Here, he stands near the front entrance during a tour on Jan. 25. Staff photo by Joseph C. Garza
EDITOR’S NOTE:
In a special report, the Tribune-Star takes a deep dive into the rationale of building a new Vigo County Security Center, focusing on conditions of the current jail, details of its population and community efforts to stem incarceration.
Years of chronic inmate overcrowding in the Vigo County Jail are expected to be resolved with the opening of a new Vigo County Security Center on Terre Haute’s south side, projected this summer.
Built to house almost 500 inmates, the larger jail will provide not only better housing for inmates, but also space to classify inmates according to needs — for instance, general population versus those needing addiction, mental health or medical help.
And, of great importance to the county, the new jail should resolve a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claiming the overcrowded conditions of the current jail violate constitutional rights. Experience has taught county leaders, however, that building a larger jail is not a lasting solution. Vigo County Sheriff John Plasse said he expectsthe new jail to reach 80% capacity — the threshold for overcrowding — soon after it opens.
“Obviously, if you are over 80%, you are overcrowded,” Plasse said during a tour of the unfinished jail in the fall. “We are going to be that the first year. And I even asked, ‘Let’s do at least 700 [beds].’ But a lot of people are saying we need a smaller jail, [that] we don’t even need this jail.”
It’s not that Plasse wants more prisoners.
“The people who are here, unfortunately, are the ones who just can’t stay out of trouble,” he said. “They get here, they get released. They get re-arrested, they get released again. And finally you say, ‘No, you have to stay, you’re not learning.’”
History of overcrowding
In Vigo County, the fight over overcrowding has been ongoing for more than four decades. In the late 1970s, county leaders decided to replace an outdated, 72-year-old facility a block away from the Vigo County Courthouse. Even while construction was ongoing in the summer of 1980 to build that new jail, then-sheriff Andrew Atelski declared the new facility “obsolete before it is finished.” It needed to be larger, he said. That new jail had a capacity for 86 inmates, but weekend jail populations already were regularly exceeding 100. In 2000, the first federal lawsuit alleging overcrowding was filed against the county, prompting an expansion of the jail built in 1980.
The expansion was completed in 2001, and a cap of 268 inmates eventually was set by an agreement with the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, which had filed suit on behalf of inmates.
Fewer than 10 years later, then-Sheriff Jon Marvel was reporting an inmate census of 315. “It has been high for several weeks running. What happened, I don’t know,” Marvel told the Tribune-Star in mid-July 2009.
For one, the county was dealing with a methamphetamine epidemic that resulted in multiple arrests for clandestine drug manufacturing and dealing. An overall increase in criminal activity and arrests filled the jail beyond capacity, and the local court system was struggling with the increase in criminal cases.
To alleviate some of the overcrowding in the jail, superior court judges were releasing inmates on their own recognizance, or the agreement not to commit another crime, as a way to get the jail census closer to the cap. Several of those inmates found themselves back in the jail within days or weeks.
At the time, the jail overcrowding issue was blossoming in many counties around the state. And the problem was about to get worse with a change by the state concerning which inmates must be held at the local level.
New state rule
In 2011, the state prison system was also experiencing overcrowding. State officials and the Indiana Department of Correction implemented new rules that directed counties to keep their lower-level felony offenders in county jails to serve their sentences.
That change eased state prison housing problems, but it only made the problem worse for county jails — although Vigo County already had a community corrections facility and later would begin working on alternatives such as problem- solving courts. (This spring, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed legislation easing the requirement that counties hold their own low-level offenders.)
By August 2016, then-sheriff Greg Ewing was reporting a record high inmate count of 370.
Of those inmates at that time, 295 were housed in the Vigo County Jail, while 75 inmates were being housed in Parke, Sullivan, Knox and Daviess counties — which had available beds.
Ewing said the jail was projected to spend about $1 million that year just to house Vigo inmates in other facilities in order to adhere to the federal mandate.
“We are spending over $26,000 a day for room and board, and that number is going to go up,” Ewing said.
In the first eight months of 2016, jail staff logged more than 15,600 miles transporting Vigo inmates to neighboring jails, and staff had worked an estimated 4,400 hours in overtime attributed to the overcrowding.
But as a result of the continued violation of the 268 inmate cap set by the original agreement reached in federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union in 2016 revived its lawsuit against Vigo County.
Since then, the federal court has been heavily involved in pushing Vigo County to remedy its jail situation. Monthly reports on inmate numbers and other data must be submitted to the court.
The alternatives
Jail and prison construction are notoriously unpopular projects — and not only among taxpayers, who ultimately pay for jail services.
Social justice organizations decry incarceration as a solution to societal woes, pointing out the frequent lack of intervention and services that could help those in jail overcome problems.
Public officials object to the cost of building jails, even though they are required to provide adequate facilities for offenders.
Sheriff Plasse points out there’s nothing in the law that puts responsibility to provide addiction and mental health treatment on the county. However, providing those services benefits the county by getting people the help they need and, hopefully, keeping them out of jail.
How to address the problem goes beyond county sheriffs, who are tasked with holding pre-trial inmates and convicted low-level offenders.
Which offenders must be held is largely determined by lawmakers and judges, whereas it is governing bodies such as the County Council that determine a sheriffs’ funding. “I don’t know the answer,” Plasse said of housing people whose criminal behavior is a result of mental health issues and/or addiction. “I know the jail is not the best spot for them. But if they are violent and out of control, people think we need to put them in jail.”
David Bolk, a former Vigo circuit court judge and city court judge, is familiar with the local judicial system after serving more than 26 years on the bench.
Now a professor of constitutional law at Indiana State University, Bolk has been tuned in to the jail overcrowding issue for years.
“I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who can be let out of the jail,” Bolk said of his years in circuit court.
That was surprising to him, he said. Before taking the bench he hadn’t considered it would be part of a judge’s responsibility to determine who could be released due to overcrowding.
Overcrowding is a multi-level issue, he said, and the larger question is who is in jail and why (see related story). The local justice system makes a concerted effort to examine who is in jail because of the pretrial detainment rule set by the Indiana Supreme Court.
Bolk said he used to go through the jail roster on Fridays to see who could be released without bond, anticipating a weekend influx of arrests. When he took the bench in 1991, Bolk said, the census cap at the jail was around 139 inmates, and people convicted of low-level offenses could still be sent to the state Department of Correction.
When the state changed the policies regarding misdemeanors and Level 6 felonies — saying those offenders must be incarcerated in their own counties — it took pressure off the overcrowded state prison system — but the change shifted the burden to Indiana counties. A jail has at least five functions, Bolk said, citing short-term punishment, people who won’t show up for court days, people who can’t stay out of jail without committing multiple offenses, serious criminals who cannot be released, and probation violators.
When the state also determined that counties must handle their own Level 6 felonies, that meant jails became a de facto DOC, he said.
Bolk agrees that the danger of building a larger jail is that it quickly will be filled.
Requiring high bonds for release also is a concern, but local judges consider community safety as a factor in setting bond. Bolk said he also limited the use of bail bonds while he was on the bench, partly because of the financial toll it took on families who paid the funds to secure a loved one’s release. Indiana allows each county to decide its own bond policies.
During his 12 years on the bench in Vigo Superior Court 5, retired Judge Michael Rader was often critical of the high number of people held while awaiting trial.
Reached recently for his perspective on the continuing overcrowding situation, Rader said he hasn’t stayed in touch with the issues as he has relocated away from the Wabash Valley. But he continues to feel too many people are “warehoused” pretrial.
He also was not in favor of investing millions of dollars into building a new and larger jail, preferring a focus on the overwhelming societal problems of drug use, addiction and mental illness.
One change needed for the criminal justice system and society in general, Rader said, is decriminalization of drug use.
“I don’t think we’re going down the right path,” he said.
But he said he feels it may take the wisdom of future generations to make legislative changes needed for decriminalization. While on the bench, Rader often relied on his other profession — as a medical doctor — to understand the issues of drug use and addiction. He often saw defendants who were self-medicating due to mental health issues or to deal with childhood abuse or other traumatic events.
Pretrial programs such as the newer dual diagnosis program through community corrections are the right direction to take in combating the issues of substance use and mental health, he said. His criticism of the overcrowded jail, Rader said, was not directed at the performance of current or past sheriffs. “I think the sheriffs have been honest when they say the facility is not acceptable,” Rader said.
The need for jails
In October 2021, a report critical of the cost of jail expansion and construction in Vigo County was released by the Vera Institute of Justice, an independent nonprofit national research and policy organization.
The report claimed to analyze spending on incarceration in Indiana. It said that on average, “counties spent $3,278,318 or 8.5% of their total budget on jail expenses — approximately $54 per county resident.”
Former Sheriff Ewing says he also reviewed the Vera Institute study, and like Judge Bolk, he found some gaps in the data.
“It’s such a complex issue and they’re taking a simplistic look at it and not looking at all the moving parts,” Ewing said of the Vera study.
Louis Reeves, a professor of criminal justice at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, said he also looked through the Vera Institute study, and thinks it is a good starting point for conversations about incarceration.
With college students, Reeves said, he talks about the need for a correctional system. Society punishes people as a deterrent to criminal behavior, uses rehabilitation with services such as counseling and treatment, and restitution as a way of restoring community.
“We have to have facilities and structures in place as a society,” Reeves said of a correctional system. “We have to have these structures, and we also have to look at what levels we will use them.”
The Vera report focuses on funding, he said.
“It’s true that people don’t want to spend money on incarceration,” Reeves said.
Yet the study does not look at the contributing factors of how an individual goes through the system, or how an individual encounters the justice system in the first place.
Reeves said he tries to teach “life-course criminology” showing that not just one factor drives a person into criminal behavior.
Bill Watson, director of Vigo County Community Corrections for more than two decades, said he also read the Vera Institute criticism of Vigo County’s jail construction project as a costly project that would not resolve overcrowding.
Many people are concerned about the number of jails being built across the state and the nation, Watson said.
“People think they are building them to house more people, but some of the state’s jails are pretty old and need to be replaced,” he said.
The 1980s-era Vigo jail is a prime example, he noted.
But he also agrees that if the only tactic used to combat overcrowding is to build bigger jails without providing effective services, then jails will continue to be overcrowded.
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