Attorney for city decries prisoner-release request

Three federal judges will hold a hearing next week on releasing prisoners.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- The granting of a prisoner-release order for Mahoning County jail, which has been requested by lawyers for the inmates who filed a lawsuit over jail conditions, would be "disastrous," a city lawyer said.
"You effectively, at that point, have no criminal justice system. When you get to that point, you're releasing major criminals. These are people who are awaiting trial on serious crimes," said Anthony J. Farris, deputy city law director. "A lot of the redevelopment efforts fall straight under if people are afraid to live in a community," he said Wednesday.
The request for an immediate injunction capping the jail at 288 inmates was filed Monday by Akron lawyers Robert Armbruster and Thomas Kelley on behalf of the jail inmates who filed a federal class action lawsuit against the county in November 2003. U.S. District Judge David D. Dowd Jr. has been overseeing jail operations since March 2005, when he determined the lockup was overcrowded and unsafe.
Injunction hearing set
Judge Dowd announced Tuesday that he and U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster and Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals will conduct a hearing on the injunction request at 9:30 a.m. next Thursday in the U.S. Courthouse in Akron.
"An immediate injunction is necessary because the jail is an extremely violent and dangerous place, exposing inmates to actual physical harm. In addition, tensions at the jail are high. Staff are unable to observe, let alone control inmate behavior," the inmates' lawyers wrote in their motion for injunctive relief.
"The plaintiffs' constitutional rights are being violated as the result of overcrowding. The plaintiffs are subjected to irreparable injury that can only be remedied by the issuance of this injunction," the inmates' lawyers wrote. Citing what they called "the high likelihood of a mass disturbance" in the jail, they added that the inmates could not wait until the May 16 and 17, 2007, hearing the three judges had set on whether to issue a prisoner-release order.
Expert's findings
In their request for the injunction, Armbruster and Kelley echoed the findings of Vincent M. Nathan, the jail expert appointed by the three-judge panel, who recently concluded that only a prisoner-release order limiting the jail to 288 inmates will remedy what he termed the jail's unconstitutional overcrowding.
Despite an inmate-release mechanism devised by the county common pleas judges to limit the jail to 296 inmates, the partially open jail housed 486 inmates on Nov. 16, 382 of them in double occupancy cells, Nathan reported. Since then, Sheriff Randall Wellington has asked the county commissioners for an additional 3.8 million to bring his 2007 budget to 19.7 million and pay for the hiring of 42 new deputies to allow the full reopening of the jail. A fully open jail would raise the capacity to 564 inmates, Jail Warden Alki Santamas has said.
In his notice of the hearing, Judge Dowd said the panel is especially interested in comments in the written briefs to be filed by noon Wednesday on whether the court has the authority to issue an interim release order and what findings it must make in order to do so.
Opposing views
Farris, who said he'd file a brief opposing a prisoner-release order, said he would be "very surprised" if the judges issue such an order from the bench next Thursday. "Whether you call it an injunction, whether you call it an interim order, it's still a prisoner-release order," Farris said, adding that such orders may be granted only if an evidentiary hearing establishes that crowding causes constitutional violations and that a prisoner-release order is the only remedy.
"You can't just whip off a prisoner-release order," Farris said.
But County Prosecutor Paul Gains, who said his office is also preparing a brief, said he wouldn't be surprised if the federal judges issue a prisoner-release order next Thursday, or very soon thereafter, if the city and county don't reach an agreement before then on jail use.
Gains said that county officials "had a very productive meeting with city officials" concerning an agreement Monday and that city officials were discussing the matter among themselves Wednesday "with an eye toward settlement." The negotiations between the city and county concern jail bed allocations for city misdemeanor prisoners and potential payments by the city for housing its misdemeanor prisoners in the county jail.
"I'm hoping that we are able to represent to the court next week that the City of Youngstown and the county and the plaintiffs have reached a tentative settlement in order to avoid the release mechanism," that might be triggered by the federal judges, Gains said. "Everybody wants this resolved, I think, and we're working toward that," he concluded.