Portage County Jail Must Expand to Accommodate Inmates

The Portage County Jail will be receiving a $13 million expansion. The jail has become incredibly overcrowded and lacking beds. The overflowing of inmates began when the heroin epidemic hit Northeast Ohio just a few years ago. In Portage County, the new inmates have mostly been female.

“There’s a higher rate of females being arrested compared to what it was a few years ago,” Captain Ricky Neal said. “Our current female pod is rated for 34 and we have up in the 50s, up in the 40s, so what we did was a couple years ago we decided to take our trustee pod and make into a female dormitory style to help us with the overcrowding.”

Captain Ricky Neal works in the Sheriff’s Office Jail Department and has helped spearhead the plan for the expansion of the jail. He says that the issue of overcrowding began around 2013 and 2014. “The scenery is packed wall to wall. You see a lot of different people from different backgrounds coming through and it’s really sad because they’re going through detox,” Capt. Neal Said

The plan adds 149 beds, increasing jail capacity from 218 to 367 for the new pod. It boosts female inmate capacity from 97 to 132 and adds 10 additional beds for inmates with mental health issues, medical needs or behavioral problems who require “constant supervision.”

Sarah Adkins is currently an inmate in the Portage County Jail. She received a 100-day sentence for trespassing, accomplice to theft, and failed drug tests. This is her longest stay at the Portage County Jail. Her other stays were short durations of eight and ten days.  She saw the overcrowding first hand within the first two weeks of her sentence.

“There are boats (cots) everywhere because there are no more beds. It’s loud. The bathrooms are open so there’s no privacy,” Adkins said. “Correctional Officers get overworked running back and forth.

At first, Adkins was with the general population. She was moved to the trustee pod for good behavior. The trustee pod is dormitory style and has more space. As a trustee Adkins works on the trade of sewing.

“I make clothes, mattress, covers, sheets, and property bags,” Adkins said. “Pretty soon we’ll start making women’s panties.”

In attempting to help with the jail overcrowding issue, the Portage County Jail implements classes called Houses of Healing. That way, when the inmates are released, they don’t return to jail. The Rising Phoenix class is for trustees and is like an AA meeting. The class was created to teach and remind inmates to be grateful for things they have on the outside. Church is also offered five days per week to different denominations.

The officers at the jail try to resolve the overcrowding by teaching inmates trade skills like sewing landscaping, painting, and cleaning so that they can be a functioning member of society when their sentence is done.

Adkins says that it is still difficult to recover from addiction because people all around her reminisce of the “good days” before they were in jail. “They don’t reflect on the bad part of the drugs,” Adkins said.

Ultimately, the officers in the Portage County Jail want to figure out a way to alleviate the issue of overcrowded pods by slowing down the flow of new inmates coming in and old inmates returning.

There has been no announcement on when the new facility of dormitory pods will be finished.