As the state/federal intervention continues in Shelby County, looming issues relating to local jail facilities have gotten worse.
Overcrowding, already a problem, has been exacerbated by an influx of arrestees. Some of the overflow has been taken care of via some neighborly help from nearby jurisdictions — like Haywood County, which for some months has been housing surplus inmates from the county.
But there are other complications, as well. Relations among Sheriff Floyd Bonner, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, and the county commission remain strained because of an impasse over funding during budget season.
And this week saw the posting online of a scathing analysis of the sheriff’s office in general and jail operations in particular by Tom Jones, on his Smart City Memphis blog, in a piece entitled “Shelby County Jail Culture: A Death Sentence for Too Many.”
Writes Jones: “… Under [Bonner’s] watch, Shelby County Jail has faced mounting scrutiny for chronic mismanagement, inmate deaths, overcrowding, and failures in oversight that have drawn criticism from judges, jail inspectors and experts, watchdogs, and civil rights advocates alike.”
And those are some of the mildest words in a point-by-point critique that notes Bonner’s recent decision to offer unbridled access to the jail and its inmates to ICE at a time when the agency “is creating distress and fear” as it “racially profiles Hispanics in Memphis neighborhoods.”
Beyond even the inadequacies of the current jail administration and its extraordinary death toll is the fact that, as former Sheriff (and County Mayor) Mark Luttrell has observed, the current “fortress-like” jail was ill-conceived in the first place, both physically and from a standpoint of addressing cultural realities.
And, even as recent efforts to address the need for starting over with a new jail, newly conceived, have collapsed under the weight of political opposition to a prospective New Chicago site, construction estimates in the vicinity of $1.4 billion threaten to burden the county with $100 million in annual bond payments for 30 years.
For all that, the jail matter, as Jones stresses, is the issue that won’t go away.
• Meanwhile, in Millington, a regime change dating from last year’s city election has resulted in various ongoing political conflicts, scarcely noticed beyond that city’s limits, including a petition campaign to remove the city manager, Frankie Dakin.
Dakin, former chief of staff to Shelby County Mayor Harris, a Democrat, was selected by the Millington Board of Aldermen to become city manager a year ago, replacing longtime city manager Ed Haley. Dakin himself is a former alderman and is the son-in-law of Larry Dagen, who was elected the city’s mayor last year, defeating Cary Vaughn, who at the time was chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party.
One prominent supporter of the petition drive is Terry Roland, a former two-term county commissioner who ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for county mayor in 2018. Roland was executive director of the Millington Area Chamber of Commerce before resigning last December in the wake of the election. Roland, who supported Vaughn in the mayoral election, told the Flyer, “The petition is not my doing, but I’m in favor of it. City government is a mess right now.”
Dakin said the petition was “just politics” and was initially the work of a disgruntled former city employee. He denied that the effort had any popular support and expressed confidence that he had, and would continue to have, the full backing of the Board of Aldermen.