GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Brown County Sheriff John Gossage is expected to give a presentation at Wednesday’s Brown County Board of Supervisors meeting on jail overcrowding and a possible expansion.
“This is a big dollar item, this isn’t going to be something that we’re looking at that will have a minimal impact on the county, on the taxpayers,” says Sheriff Gossage. “Brown County is growing and we will need the space, it’s just a matter of when and I want to provide them factual information so they can make that determination.”
According to statistics that Gossage will present in his 76-page power point to supervisors, the total inmate growth of the Brown County Jail, including those in the Electronic Monitoring Program, has risen 4.1 percent each year from 2001 to 2016. In the year-to-date slide, the average daily population of adult inmates housed is 677.5 or about 95 percent of adult bed capacity.
“Brown County is ever growing, it’s at a point where there are more felonious crimes. 70 percent of our inmates are felons or have been charged with felonies,” Gossage says. “The demographics of the jail, which is one of the things I’ll be discussing at County Board, has changed so much.”
Officials say that felony offenders are, “less likely to be released from custody resulting in an increase in the percentage of inmates being housed.”
Another key statistic board members and the public will likely will be what the Wisconsin Department of Corrections guidelines recommend for the “operating maximum” number of inmates based upon capacity of the jail. In the case of the Brown County Jail, that would be 673 inmates. The actual maximum per DOC guidelines is 733 adults.
The slides from Sheriff Gossage estimate that, “with an ADP (average daily population) of 678.8 adults, the Brown County Jail is already over the recommended 673 capacity if adults were in Juliet (this is a 20 bed increase from current housing).”
Officials will apparently be transitioning the “Juliet” pod, which currently houses juveniles, to adults while moving the juveniles to the “Kilo” pod. They say while it increases the bed space available for adults, it will negatively affect juvenile programming due to the space available in the “Kilo” pod. Jail revenue will also decline due to the, “loss of contract juvenile bed days.”
“Whether they’re going to want to spend money on boarding out prisoners, or an architectural study and a build out of a dormitory-style area attached to the facility,” says Gossage. “We will need the space.”
Another concept that’s been raised in the past has been having court commissioners hold hearings on Saturdays. Currently, they do not hold hearings on weekends or holidays leading to the population in the “India” pod being the highest on Mondays prior to court.
The meeting takes place at 7 p.m. inside Green Bay City Hall.
