Earlier this month, Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter talked with with MTN News about his plan to host public discussions on the current status of the Cascade County Detention Center, and how to work toward long-term sustainability.
He kicked off those discussions with a Facebook live event on Wednesday, October 30, 2024.
“We've tried almost everything that we can think of since my administration has taken over to try different things, you know, we got rid of the state prison, we brought in the feds because we could have less feds that paid more, therefore dropping our population but increasing our revenues. Then we did pretrial, so we worked to get that going; we're going to see, that’s in its infancy, so we'll see how that goes,” explained Sheriff Slaughter.
“We need to start looking at some other solutions down the road as well, to make sure that we're sustaining the numbers the way we need to, because we have to be able to take care of our public,” he said.
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Of the Sheriff's Office $12 million budget, only about $4 million comes from the general fund.
They could essentially bring in additional federal inmates to raise money; however, they already don’t have enough beds for that kind of intake.
“The problem is that at that level, there's no beds left for people to be arrested from off the street, and that's what I'm concerned about. How do we sustain that number? And that number is going to increase as our population grows,” Slaughter said.
Ideally, they would like to have around 200 open beds to allow for taking in criminals off the streets while working to keep the jail below capacity. They are in the process of coming up with ideas to best serve the public.
“I'm an elected official, the county commissioners are an elected official; we are responsible to do what the public wants us to do. We want to hear what the public wants and then it’s our job to make it happen,” Slaughter added.
They will continue to seek public input to figure out how to run the jail properly and achieve long-term sustainability.
