'No Quick Fix' to N.C. County Jail's COVID-Fueled Staffing Crisis

A deepening staffing crisis at the COVID-racked Mecklenburg County Jail — where more than half the jobs lie vacant — has drawn a quick response from local and federal agencies, but few quick solutions.

On Dec. 21, a state inspection found an alarming number of job vacancies within the uptown detention center that presented “an imminent threat to (the) safety of the inmates and staff,” said Chris Wood, chief jail inspector for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

In a Dec. 23 letter to Sheriff Garry McFadden, Wood said the Sheriff’s Office “should take immediate action to de-populate the facility to a level that can be managed by available staff.”

The safety problems could be exacerbated by the most recent COVID-19 outbreak, Wood said, which as of Monday had sickened 133 inmates and 23 members of McFadden’s staff.

As of Tuesday morning, the state’s largest local detention facility housed 1,375 adult inmates. In his report, Wood recommended an overall population of less than 1,000. That’s about a 30% cut.

To meet it, the jail would have to move hundreds of inmates to other facilities or work with the court system to make other arrangements, from unsecuring bonds to outright releases.

Meanwhile, the flood of resignations inside the jail has spiked. In early December, 141 of the jail’s 470 positions were empty. As of Tuesday, the vacancies had risen to 250, sheriff’s spokeswoman Janet Parker said, about 53 percent of the jail staff. That included 180 detention officers.

Another 68 slots in McFadden’s department with non-jail duties — including 50 deputies — are also unfilled, Parker said. The Sheriff’s Office has about 1,100 employees overall.

McFadden said in a statement Monday that many of the vacancies are related to the added demands of the pandemic.

The proposed reduction to the jail population is daunting. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, courthouse officials released dozens of inmates to lessen the chances of a viral outbreak. Now, they are faced with moving hundreds.

Carla Archie, the county’s senior resident Superior Court judge, told the Observer in an email that she and other courthouse officials were meeting with McFadden on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the jail situation. “But at this point, there are no concrete plans.”

In its statement on Monday, the Sheriff’s Office said it would try multiple approaches to reduce the jail population, including the transfer of inmates who have been sentenced to state facilities, working with criminal justice partners to identify prisoners who might be eligible for release or checking with other counties to see if they could share the inmate load.

However, multiple counties contacted by the Observer on Tuesday said they weren’t in a position to help.

“Right now, no,” Cabarrus County Chief Deputy James Bailey said. “We’ve actually got free bed space. The problem is we don’t have staff.”

Federal inmates, county jail

Last week, the Sheriff’s Office also approached the federal courts of the Western District of North Carolina, which as of Tuesday had 391 inmates housed in the Mecklenburg jail awaiting trial.

According to U.S. Clerk of Court Frank Johns, McFadden wrote to Chief U.S. District Court Judge Martin Reidinger of Asheville seeking alternatives to pretrial custody of federal inmates.

The district has one of the highest rates of pretrial detention of any federal court system in the country. The U.S. Marshals Service also pays Mecklenburg County some $30 million a year to house federal inmates in its jail, Johns said.

Johns said options to pretrial detention are limited by federal law and the fact that the federal courts in general handle more dangerous career criminals than their state counterparts.

Nonetheless, he said, the Western District’s judges have agreed “to pick up the pace” on sentencings to move inmates in the Mecklenburg jail to federal prisons more quickly.

Discussions also are underway with the Iredell, Gaston and Catawba County jails to take on some of Mecklenburg’s federal prisoners, Johns said. Some may be temporarily moved out of state before trial.

The Gaston County Sheriff’s Office told the Observer on Tuesday that it will be taking 10 of Mecklenburg’s federal inmates.

That relief for Mecklenburg comes with a price, Johns said. “If the inmate numbers come down, so does the check.”

“This is a difficult situation. COVID has been killing (the courts) for two years,” Johns added. “But there’s no quick fix — unless people stop committing crimes. They’re detained for a reason.”

‘Russian roulette’

The pandemic has laid waste to criminal justice systems in North Carolina and across the country since the spring of 2020. It has closed courthouses, delayed trials and sickened government employees who still showed up for work.

Delays in bond hearings and trials also lengthened jail stays for thousands of criminal defendants, who faced a greater risk of catching the coronavirus in communal and cramped quarters housing highly fluid populations.

Two years ago, the Mecklenburg courts stopped prosecuting most misdemeanors and culled the list of jail inmates to reduce the population in an effort stave off the virus.

COVID-19 regularly surged through the jail anyway as jail staff and new inmates brought the virus through the locked gates. Much of the jail remains on “respiratory lockdown.” As with millions of other Americans during the pandemic, many Mecklenburg jailers walked away from their jobs.

Defense attorneys with clients in the jail spoke of deteriorating conditions. On New Year’s Eve, the local Fraternal Order of Police weighed in on its Facebook page about the staffing shortages and what it described as an uptick in violence against the jail staff.

“Multiple pods and hallways inadequately staffed, some not staffed, and officers being worked 18-plus hours, some working 24,’’ according to the post. “... It should not take another serious assault for the state to take control?”

Charlotte attorney Tim Emry, an early leader in the Decarcerate Mecklenburg movement in 2020 who is now running for Mecklenburg district attorney, says reducing the jail population will be more difficult due to what he says is an uptick in unnecessary prosecutions and pretrial detentions for lower-level offenses. As a result, he says, pre-pandemic numbers of potentially infected people are returning to the courthouse and the jail.

“The sheriff is probably the least powerful, least influential official involved in all of this,” he said. “He just can’t let people out.”

Incumbent District Attorney Spencer Merriweather said he has been disheartened by the jail crisis because prosecutors and other Mecklenburg court personnel enacted earlier reforms to ensure that only “the right people are being held in custody.”

He says the courthouse needs to expand trial operations to reduce the inmate backlog at the jail and has learned how to do that safely.

“In everything we do and in everything we do from here on out,” he said, “we should strive to balance public safety and public health without sacrificing either. That should be our mission going forward.”

Mecklenburg Public Defender Kevin Tully was among the courthouse officials who met with McFadden on Tuesday afternoon as the sheriff outlined the jail situation.

Tully predicts the crisis will spur some collective action, perhaps even a court order, to reduce the number of state inmates being held in the jail before trial. As of Tuesday, that number included 880 defendants accused of felonies and 89 charged with misdemeanors

Too many remain in custody, Tully said, not because they pose a significant threat to public safety but because they can’t afford the bond a judge placed on their release.

“We’ll be taking a closer look at who’s in the jail, to see if the number can be brought down and that it can be done in a safe manner. There’s no doubt in my mind that it can,” Tully said.

“There are plenty of people in the jail right now where the judge has already made a decision to release them. The problem is that the judge as a condition of release attached a monetary number. The fact that a client is poor has frustrated the judge’s decision to release him.”

Staff writer Jonathan Limehouse contributed.

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