Shoshone County loses jail certification

WALLACE –– “We have a major issue.”

Like many other counties and cities across the country, Shoshone County has seen a rise in crime rates over the past few years. This has led to an increased number of inmates needing to be housed in local and state correctional facilities – many of them over their intended capacity.

The Shoshone County Public Safety Building is not immune to this problem and because of this limited space, the jail has now lost its certification – a massive cause of concern for Sheriff Holly Lindsey.

According to their recent inspection by the Idaho Sheriff’s Association (ISA), it was documented that the Shoshone County jail facilities were over their rated inmate capacity in at least one of their cell block or housing units for 76 of 91 days.

What this means for the jail is two-fold. The first issue is that by failing the certification, the jail now faces a potential penalty from the Idaho Counties Risk Management Program (ICRMP), the group that insures the jail and its staff. The second issue is that the jail has been a revenue generator for the county by allowing state and federal agencies to house inmates at the facility. This doesn’t mean that these agencies will cease to use Shoshone County when necessary, but it could mean that they might not rely on them as much as they have – which would affect projected revenue for the financially struggling county.

“ICRMP is our insurance carrier and I’m not sure what they’re going to do just yet,” Lindsey said. “They can either reduce our insurance coverage significantly, remove it altogether, or hopefully they won’t mess with it at all. But this insurance protects us if, for example, the county receives a lawsuit from an inmate and we don’t have the insurance to cover it then the cost will come out of the county’s pocket.”

The facility is designed to hold up to 48 inmates with the flexibility to add an additional 10 beds to the cell blocks – but according to jail Captain Eli Lopez, in recent months they have seen upwards of 64 inmates at times.

The rated inmate capacity number of 48 doesn’t entirely reflect the difficulty of the situation – the way the jail is segregated also presents challenges.

The cell blocks are broken up between males and females, but then also by inmates requiring special housing or protective custody, and then they also maintain a specific block for sex offenders.

All of these are either at capacity at this moment or over their rated limits.

“It’s important to keep our communities safe, but we need places to house these inmates,” Lopez said. “So when the public is wondering why this person or that person has been released, a lot of it has to do with a lack of housing or an officer safety issue.”

Shoshone County jail is required to have two deputies on patrol at all times – but that number applies directly to the jail’s rated capacity. When the jail becomes overfull, two deputies aren’t enough.

Currently, the jail is short four detention staff deputies, which makes an already difficult situation that much more challenging to navigate.

One of the major reasons that filling and maintaining these positions has become difficult is rooted directly in money.

The ability to pay detention staff as competitively as surrounding areas is difficult, but then there’s also the state of the workplace.

“The biggest solution, and what a look of agencies are looking at, is a new jail,” Lopez said. “We’ve heard it before, our jail is outdated, the crime rate is skyrocketing, and we’re not just housing the town drunk anymore. We’re housing people with extensive records from all over the country and it’s filling up our jail.”

The outdated facilities along with the overall stressful nature of the position make for a hard sell to potential recruits.

In 2019, the county attempted to pass a bond election to build a new $22 million state-of-the-art facility that could house 98 inmates, that bond initiative failed resoundingly as it failed to secure even a simple majority of the vote.

Four years later, the jail has only fallen further into disrepair and behind the times.

Former Sheriff Mike Gunderson spoke constantly of the bandaid fixes that were constantly being made to the facility – explaining that it would cost $9 million just to bring the building up to current standards (in 2019). With the exploding crime rate and subsequent increased inmate population, even that $9 million upgrade wouldn’t have been enough.

“I’ve never seen the jail this full this consistently,” Lindsey said. “My worry is that, with crime rates increasing all across the country, we’re not going to see this problem go away anytime soon and it’s only going to be harder on this facility. We’re not looking at a new facility as a question of if we do it, it’s a matter of when. We have to do it sometime. That’s really the only option.”

Over the years, maintaining that ISA certification has been financially beneficial for the county – resulting in anywhere from $200,000 - to $250,000 in revenue annually from housing state and federal inmates.

As of now, Sheriff Lindsey is waiting to hear back from ICRMP regarding their decision concerning the failed certification – in the meantime, the county may have potentially lost one of its larger annual revenue generators.