City Justice Center: Abandon dope all ye who enter.

We have some prescriptive points to make in the wake of the arrests Thursday of three city corrections officers on federal charges of attempting to supply heroin to an inmate at the City Justice Center.
But first, a little background:

• The city’s two corrections facilities — the new Justice Center downtown and the old Medium Security Institution (i.e., the Workhouse) on Hall Street — are no longer overcrowded hellholes, as they were in the 1950s and ’60s, before federal courts intervened. But, as the arrests — and a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri — suggest, neither are they examples of enlightened penology.
• The city has no shortage of crime and an aggressive police force, so the two jail facilities usually hold somewhere between 1,600 and 1,800 inmates at a time. Those being held for trial (as opposed to those serving jail time for misdemeanors) tend to be accused of serious crimes.
• They often stay there a long time. Many turn down plea agreements, preferring to wait up to two years to take their chances in front of notoriously lenient city juries.
• Prosecutors and public defenders are overworked and underpaid, meaning court dates often get missed.
• Guarding inmates is a 24-hour-a-day job, of course, and involves some 500 corrections officers. The starting salary is $33,306 a year. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are not. Getting rid of bad ones is extremely difficult under Civil Service rules.
• Because of this high overhead, it costs city taxpayers $53 a day to house these prisoners, most of them held on state charges.
• The state of Missouri reimburses counties (and the city is treated as a separate county) only $21.25 for holding accused criminals, and then only if they’re convicted. Twenty-one bucks might cover costs at the Knox County (pop. 4,361) Jail, but in urban areas, not so much.
• There’s not much money, and probably very little political will, to change things. “People don’t want us to cut the size of the police department to take care of the prisoners in the jail,” said Jeff Rainford, chief of staff to Mayor Francis Slay. “They don’t want us to cut the Parks Department or the Health Department. The place is not going to be Shangri-la. That being said, we try to make it better every day.”

Now for the prescriptive points: City corrections officials deserve credit for calling in federal authorities when they learned that some guards might have been smuggling drugs. The ACLU report released in March made some of the same allegations. Fortunately, the ACLU’s gumshoe’s report did not blow the federal investigation.

That said, the corrections department should be under the auspices of the St. Louis Circuit Court, not the city’s Department of Public Safety. Judges eventually will dispose of these cases; they should be engaged enough to oversee the custody and legal rights of the prisoners awaiting trial.

The state should bear a fair share of the cost of holding those accused of state crimes in urban areas.
The state also should be ashamed at what it pays prosecutors and public defenders. Justice can’t be served on the cheap.

However, as the state has its own budget problems, St. Louis city and county should move toward combined operation of their corrections departments. It would save money for taxpayers in both jurisdictions and could yield better, more professional staffing.