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Mahoning County officials air ideas to keep hearings by video
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McNally
Wellington
RELATED: Mahoning Co. sheriff candidates outline views on maintaining video arraignments
YOUNGSTOWN
The chairman of Mahoning County commissioners said he and the county sheriff are working on potential ways to maintain video arraignments in Mahoning County jail for Youngstown Municipal Court.
Options include billing Youngstown for $350,000 worth of inmate stays for those charged solely under city ordinances, and possibly transferring some deputy sheriffs from county courthouse security duty to the county jail, said Commissioners Chairman John A. McNally IV.
The billing, at $80 a day per inmate, is designed to help pay for jail staffing and will be retroactive to early 2010, McNally said.
The talks come in the wake of Sheriff Randall A. Wellington’s announcement last week that he would have to terminate video arraignments from the county jail, effective Feb. 6. He blamed insufficient staffing and inadequate funding for the move.
That meant that city police would have to start escorting inmates to the municipal-court building for arraignments.
“Video arraignments is one of several nonmandated services that will cease in order to assure the safety of our deputy family,” Sgt. William Cappabianca of the sheriff’s office told the commissioners Thursday.
“The sheriff’s obligation of public safety to the taxpayers also applies to his employees,” Cappabianca said, adding that he was speaking for the sheriff’s office administration.
“Please do not mistake the steps being taken by the sheriff as political stunts,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, Youngstown Police Chief Rod Foley said he is preparing for the possibility of his officers having to transport inmates to the municipal court and back to jail. That contingency plan calls for video arraignment from the fifth floor of the municipal court building, which was formerly the city jail, with an audio and video link to a courtroom.
That would still keep inmates physically out of the crowded courtroom for security reasons, but would require video arraignments to be rescheduled from 10:30 a.m. daily to 1:30 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Foley said.
To accommodate that, Foley said he may have to remove one or two police cars from neighborhood patrols so officers can help with the arraignments, especially on days when large numbers of inmates are being video-arraigned.
“It’s going to lessen our response times during those hours and our police visibility out there,” Foley said. “I might have to adjust start times for some of our officers working afternoon shift to come out a little bit earlier to accommodate this transportation of prisoners,” he added.
In other business, Larry Long, executive director of the County Commissioners’ Association of Ohio, told commissioners he wants the Ohio Legislature to renew the 28-cent-per-month subscriber cellular phone fee that helps support 911 emergency dispatching centers statewide.
That fee will expire at the end of this year unless the Legislature re-enacts it.
“We’re saving lives, and that’s costly, and we need to invest in that,” Long said.
Long was also here to discuss with commissioners the possibility of their joining a natural gas purchasing collaborative with other counties to lower heating costs for Mahoning County buildings.
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Comments
Until the root causes of the problems with the criminal justice system in Mahoning County are addressed and adequately resolved, the crises which periodically arise, such as the termination of video arraignments, will continue.
For two decades the criminal justice system has been dysfunctional, with the taxpayer picking up the tab for a system 33% more expensive than in neighboring Trumbull County.
The county operates a merry-go-round system, where criminals are caught by the police, put in jail until there are too many there and released for no other reason than an arbitrary decision by a court that only so many prisoners are allowed based on the staffing with deputies. If that isn't insanity.
The citizens are first damaged by crime and then by the system which spends multiple millions on health care and legal defense for the inmates each time they go to jail.
It isn't like the solution hasn't been spelled out. Lawsuits filed by inmates in the jail against the county have cost millions. They resulted in capping the number of inmates in the jail, and looking new ways to finance the jail by the city, private prisons and the county. A funding solution was found that was only temporary because the city reneged on its commitment to pay for its prisoners and the private prison took its business elsewhere.
The latest lawsuit resulted in a "working group," a misnomer if there ever was one, established by the federal court to fix the system. The county prosecutor and other county officials banned not only the public, but even the media from the meetings and now we are going to deal with it again.
The problem is not just in the sheriff's department, he simply runs the warehouse called the jail. The problems are across the system, including the caseloads of the judges, the lenient sentences that result in criminals being back on the street only to commit more crimes, the inefficient prosecution of cases, and the costly and expansive county and municipal court system.
County officials think so little of the public that they denied them access to meetings on how to fix a dysfunctional system for which they pay about $40 million a year.
But worst of all, the county commissioners' and other officials' priorities are off base. They are not addressing the most basic of needs for its citizens, public safety.
The county should begin now to take the actions recommended for decades, including those to consolidate the courts, to improve the prosecution of cases, and to sentence people to jail as appropriate.
The next thing you will hear, is another sales tax is needed. It is not about money, it is about fixing the operations.
The county in the past found funding solutions for what is a processing problem. The way to fix the system have been found, but the political will is not there. Officials almost always look for more money. Don't let that happen again.