For years, members of the Cleveland County Bar have been lobbying to install a video conferencing system inside jail facilities so lawyers and clients could have remote, but secure access to one another.

Thanks to the shutdown caused by COVID-19, that system has become a reality, and has expanded into new territories.

Two weeks ago the jail annex on Macbreyer Street began using Jurislink, a secure video conferencing service marketed to courts and court systems, to give lawyers a chance to meet with their clients while working from home under Governor Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order.

“With COVID-19 this really became a priority here,” said Allison Garren, president of the Cleveland County Bar and lawyer at Teddy, Meekins and Talbert in Shelby. “We are fortunate that we get to see our clients face to face here while they are in custody. But there are some concerns that we don’t want to get (COVID) from the detention center or give it to one of our clients.”

Garren added the installation of the new system was a collaborative effort between the county bar, district attorney’s office, sheriff’s office and local judges. It is currently only available in the jail annex, but she hopes to see it installed at the detention center in the courthouse at some point.

New opportunities

With the exception of cases involving constitutional matters, emergency custody or domestic violence, all court activity has been halted in Cleveland County.

That’s not to say nothing is going on, however. Inmates are still booked into the county jail daily, and a number of people sitting in jail have been there for some time. So the district attorney’s office along with lawyers and judges have started working on cases inside the county jail.

Using their new video conferencing services, inmates at the jail annex are able to have their first appearances in court and have hearings on plea agreements.

“Because a person has a constitutional right to appear in a courtroom, they have to sign a waiver to have their plea heard through audio and video service, and the judges ask them a series of questions to make sure they know their rights and want to have that,” said Garren.

Clearing out the backlog of “jail cases” is a priority function for the courts now, Garren added, because it gets people out of local custody, either on pretrial release or sent off to the state Department of Corrections, where they can begin serving prison sentences.

“Which is important because those clients have access to more resources in prison, and they can’t begin working their sentence down to a minimum while they are still in local custody. They can only do that in prison,” she said.

Population reduction

The extra emphasis on jail cases has also had a beneficial side effect on jail population. The jail has long suffered an overcrowding problem, which culminated recently in request for the county to spend $20 million to expand the facility.

Since the inward focus on jail cases, however, the jail population has seen a significant reduction, according to Sheriff Alan Norman.

“We’ve actually reduced or population to an extremely manageable number. I think (Wednesday’s) number is around 180 or 181, that fluctuates,” said Norman.

Of those, about 20 had already been sentenced to Department of Corrections and are awaiting transfer to a state prison.

“That number is extremely fluid. It’s been as high as 30 and as low as 10,” said Norman.”

Some of those inmates are being held, he added, because the state has shut down some prisons while it tests for the coronavirus.

The population reduction not only translates to breathing room around the jail, but also to some savings for the county. According to County Manager Brian Epley, it costs about $70 a day to house an inmate in the jail. For every inmate the judicial system can get out of the facility, that adds up to what he called “tremendous savings” for the public.

“Any time we can safely, responsibly and appropriately manage inmates through the system and get them to DOC or whenever they may need to be, that’s a good thing,” said Epley.

Pinning down how much of a savings the reduction could bring is hard to say, Epley added, but it is an appreciable amount.

“If you do the math and say we reduced our population by 20 inmates that’s $70 multiplied by 20 multiplied by seven days per week and 52 weeks per year,” he said.

If you do the math given those numbers, that’s $9,800 a week and more than half a million dollars a year.

Need for Reform

While he’s glad to to see the reduction in population, Norman said he isn’t sure it will stay at current levels once the pandemic is over and courts begin hearing more state criminal and civil cases.

“I’m optimistic about keeping the population down and my hopes are I can keep it as low as it is, but I see it trickle back up somewhat,” said Norman.

Keeping population low would require judges and district attorneys to be able to commit to multiple days per month to hear those cases in the jail in addition to their normal work loads.

Alternatively, Garren said she would like to see a collaborative effort - like the one that brought video conferencing to the jail - tackle bail and bond reform in Cleveland County.

“That’s not something that I think has been looked at in some time. I know I have been here six years, and we’ve not done it since I’ve been here” she said.

Currently, when a person is arrested and placed inside the detention center they are given a set bail amount. For those who cannot afford that bail or find a way to get bonded out, they can spend several days or weeks in jail waiting to see a judge.

“That time can be disastrous for a person’s life outside of jail. Even days or even a week, a person can lose their job, lose their house. It can have this huge ripple effect,” said Garren. “If anyone thinks they can keep their job after missing a few days from work unexcused - that’s not something I would be able to do.”

For folks arrested on nonviolent charges and with little to no criminal history, Garren said she’d like to see the county move to a pre-trial release program, which would get people out of the jail and allow them to more comfortably prepare for their day in court than just sitting in jail.

Those pre-trial programs typically involve a local person for people to contact on a regular basis, in addition to their lawyer.

Similar programs have proven effective in counties like Mecklenburg and Haywood, Garren said.

Such a program would not only help ease the stress of an overpopulated jail, but could also cut down on the number of people pleading guilty to charges they are either not guilty of or could beat if they had the resources to fight them in court, Garren said.

“I think every defense attorney in this county can tell you a story of a client who could not make a small bond, and they plead out even though they didn’t do it just because they were afraid of not being able to work again, not having their home - that’s just not how the justice system is supposed to work,” Garren said.

Dustin George can be reached at 704-669-3337 or Dustin.George@ShelbyStar.com. Find him on Twitter @DustinatTheStar.