FUNDING FOR WOMEN GUARDS AT PULASKI JAIL IN QUESTION

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 15, 1993                   TAG: 9304150163
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV6   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI                                LENGTH: Medium
FUNDING FOR WOMEN GUARDS AT PULASKI JAIL IN QUESTION
Women prisoners could no longer be kept at the Pulaski County jail if the state stopped paying for the five female guards added to the staff last year.
Sheriff Ralph Dobbins expects to find out by mid-May if the State Compensation Board will cover the jobs for another year.
Just in case it does not, he also has approached the county Board of Supervisors to see if the positions could be picked up with local money. The board, at a budget session Tuesday night, was not encouraging.
The Compensation Board found that it had some extra money after completing its allocations last year, he said, which was why Pulaski County was able to get the new guard positions.
Dobbins believed there was a good chance that the state would continue to pay for the positions. But if he should learn otherwise May 15, he said, it would be a little late to tell the employees to make other arrangements by June or to find other jails for the women prisoners.
"We're serving six counties right now, keeping their females here," he said. "We could keep 50 if we had the space."
The Sheriff's Department began housing females at the jail a year ago, after completing some renovations and adding the new guards.
The jail was supposed to be able to keep up to 20 female prisoners. Dobbins said it has only been able to keep up to 12 because of the number of male prisoners it has.
Many of those men are state prisoners, for which the state pays Pulaski $8 a day per prisoner. The state will not take them because its own prisons are overcrowded. But so is the jail. Dobbins said it is rated for a maximum of 45 prisoners, but keeps an average of 96.
If it loses its female guards and no longer can keep female prisoners, the county would have to go back to taking them to Bristol. That ties up a deputy for about three hours per round trip and runs up transportation costs.
The county also would have to pay Bristol to keep female prisoners and also would lose the revenue it gets for keeping female prisoners from other jurisdictions here.
Other counties pay Pulaski $28 a day to keep prisoners; the state pays $8 a day.
The county might be able to raise enough money from keeping female prisoners from other jurisdictions to pay for the female guards if the jail could keep 20 female prisoners at a time, as planned, Dobbins said. But the state overcrowding, filtering down to local jails, has kept that from happening.
New River Community Sentencing, a program that offers alternatives to jail time, also is seeking financial support from Pulaski County.
Beth Wellington, the program's executive director, said Montgomery and Giles counties and the town of Christiansburg contributed to the program this year.
She said 20 percent of the program's clients are from Pulaski County, but they take 25 percent of the program staff's time because their cases are often more complicated than those in other jurisdictions.
The program also offers assistance to crime victims, said Dennis DuBuc, a member of its board. "So we're working on both ends of the spectrum."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB