WAUSAU, Wis. (WSAU) — The head of Marathon County’s jail study panel says he wants to bring the group back together to return to looking at ways of improving the environment and future of the jail population.
Land Art director Paul Jones was named to the panel in 2013 after a brutal assault in the jail on a corrections officer lead to a restructuring of both how the jail operates and a restructuring of the sheriff’s department in general.
Jones says the panel was convened to handle three issues: population, safety, and technology issues. He says the changes already made to control jail population through early release and Huber programs has already saved $468,000. He says putting the inmates to work in improving the jail has also saved the county money in the long run and also worked to improve inmate relations with the corrections officers. He’s also crediting the work of the new jail administrator Sandra La Du-Ives in bettering both the inmates safety as well as the safety of the officers in the jail.
But Jones says the next step in the process has to be reducing the population in the first place. “If you have too high a population, and that population is not easily controllable or friendly to staff, you have a potential problem. And that needs to be defused.” Jones is proposing that the jail needs to work to better remediate inmates and cut recidivism. “If we create what is truly a corrections facility, and we have throughput, successful graduates of that program, we can then begin to control the population.”
The other issue that Jones says needs to be tackled is the growing drug problem in the County. And he’s quick to point out that any community like Wausau and the surrounding Metro is going to have these same issues. “Drug dealers are going to come here to improve their profitability and actually reduce their risks. It’s a relatively easy community to find lodging and a place to do business.” That’s a problem he wants the panel to look at, because he says the county is running out of resources to handle things right now. “Because the problem is larger, we have proportionally less capacity to financially handle it. We never built our departments or our jail for the scope of this problem.”
Jones says more information will be released closer to the convening of the panel, which he’s tentatively set for the second week of March.
