Jails To Get More Peaceful With Exception Of One Floor

GuilfordGuilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes is making a big move in an effort to address the growing problem of inmates with mental health issues and substance abuse problems in the county jails.

The county is hiring a psychiatric nurse practitioner and a counselor who will be dedicated to treating inmates with mental health issues, and the jails in Greensboro and High Point will be implementing a new incarceration system in which inmates with mental health problems will all be removed from the jails’ general population and placed together in a single 40-person pod in the Greensboro jail.  Likewise, drug addicts will be placed in an adjacent 40-person pod on the same floor as the mental health patients.

For the first time, those two problem populations will be isolated from the general population and consolidated in a way that makes regular and consistent treatment for their issues much easier, and one that makes life easier on all other inmates as well.

Read More…

Alamance closes jail annex because of a lack of inmates

— Alamance County has closed part of its jail because of a decline in inmates.

The Times-News of Burlington reported (http://bit.ly/1ONGFrT) that the sheriff’s office decided to temporarily close an annex that had housed 30 female inmates.

A declining jail population prompted officials to move the women inmates back to the main jail in Graham.

Sheriff Terry Johnson says the county has up to 520 inmates a day under normal circumstances. Johnson says the jail has topped out around 340 inmates for the past couple of months.

Read more…