Discussion of Richmond County Jail overcrowding draws a crowd

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WJBF) – There are nearly 1,000 inmates at the Webster Detention Center waiting to go to court, after COVID crushed the court system creating a massive backlog.

“It did, and that’s what we need to work on we’re up at least four hundred inmates before COVID we were around eight hundred now I’m floating around twelve hundred,” said Major Charles Mitchell of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office.

It was a crowded room to take on the overcrowding, court officials and city leaders sitting down to work on solutions.

Getting inmates out means getting them to court, but the Public Defender’s office saying it’s hands are full.

“They need more public defenders in order to get the people run through and with the public defenders and with the public defenders some of the challenges they are facing is they are not getting paid enough,” said Commissioner Wayne Guilfoyle.

One proposal from the meeting is to create a working group to focus on overcrowding.

“A path forward  and that is creating a committee so we can all come together to find viable solutions so that’s the silver lining,” said Commissioner Stacy Pulliam.

Late l year the Sheriff proposing a new jail pod with two hundred beds, and all the focus on speeding up getting cases to court is not taking that plan off the table.

“We’re going to have to build a jail pod, there is nothing we can do to get around that but we can make sure program are in place to keep us from having to revisit this conversation about overcrowding in the future,” said Commissioner Jordan Johnson.

“There were 266 arrested in the last two weeks are all those felonies no but as long as we keep those numbers, we’re going to keep on having the same problem,” said Major Mitchell.

But the work is getting started to try and cut that problem down to size.

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