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Polk County Jail Ranks Among Nation's Busiest

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By BILLY TOWNSEND

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 5, 2008

Updated: 04/05/2008 12:16 am

LAKELAND - The Polk County Jail in 2006 housed more people per capita than any jail in the state, and ranked fifth in the nation among cites or counties with their own jail systems, a new study says.

The study by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank dedicated to "ending society's reliance on incarceration," focuses on the growth of county and city jail populations during the past 10 years. During the same period, the rise in population of the larger state and federal prison systems has slowed, the study says.

Local jails are generally where the accused await trial after arrest or where those convicted of misdemeanor or minor felony charges serve their time.

Though Polk ranks highest in the state, Florida's larger counties account for eight of the top 40 incarceration rates in the country, according to the study. The city of Jacksonville, or Duval County, ranks sixth nationally; Pinellas County ranks 10th; Hillsborough is 20th.

The bulk of the study does not focus on Florida, however, and there's little analysis of why Florida's county jail populations are so high.

The authors point to several factors contributing to the national increases. They include:

•Increased populations of people detained on immigration violations and held in local jails.

•Less reliance on sentences served in the community under monitoring rather than inside a jail.

•An increase in the number of people held as they await trial. The study notes that since 1992, "fewer people have been released pretrial without bail, fewer have been granted bail at all, and, of those granted bail, fewer have been able to make the payment." The study adds, "The increase in the number of unconvicted people held in jails accounts for 85 percent of the total increase of the jail population between 1996 and 2006."

The Polk County Sheriff's Office sees incarceration as the best way to prevent crime because the offenders and accused offenders housed inside can't commit crime on the outside, said sheriff's spokesman Scott Wilder. The population ranking is not something the sheriff's office considers a problem, Wilder said.

He also noted that the office has a number of rehabilitation programs at the jail and plans to open a work camp at the site of the Central County Jail in Bartow that could house up to 100 inmates outside the cells and dorms of the actual jail.

Polk County Commissioner Randy Wilkinson, a longtime critic of incarceration rates in the county, said a jail stay can "cripple" a person financially and make it more difficult to integrate back into society.

He praised Polk Sheriff Grady Judd for some of the programs in place for offenders at the county jail and put part of the blame for Polk's high incarceration rate on what he called a "pro-arrest" attitude among the Florida Legislature.

Wilkinson has been questioning Polk's incarceration rate since before his own run-ins with the law: He was arrested in 2002 on a domestic violence charge and in 2006 on a DUI charge. He maintained he was innocent both times.

The first charge, involving a scuffle in which he put his hands on his ex-wife, was dropped after he took a three-hour course. No one was injured.

The DUI charge was dropped unconditionally after no drugs or alcohol were found in Wilkinson's system. Lakeland police officers said he had been driving and speaking erratically, but a video of the arrest showed little evidence of that.

Reporter Billy Townsend can be reached at (863) 284-1409 or wtownsend@tampatrib.com.

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