CATSKILL — The Greene County Jail in Coxsackie has been keeping the women’s pod closed due to a shortage of corrections officers, said Greene County Administrator Shaun Groden.
The pod will remain closed until additional staff is hired.
Groden said the jail, which averages 40 inmates a month, needs at least four more corrections officers to be fully operational.
Groden attributes the shortage to stringent requirements for the position.
Female Greene County inmates are being transferred to board at other county jails, an expenditure for which the 2023 county budget has allocated $100,000. In 2021 the county paid $70 to $75 per day for each inmate boarding at a separate facility.
“The county’s boarding expenditures are no greater than the amount it would need to pay to keep the women’s pod open,” Groden said. “The County will not see a budget deficit.
There are 11 individuals applying to be corrections officers at the jail, Groden said. They are awaiting results from a written exam, after which they will need to pass a background check.
Fully staffed, the jail personnel payroll is $2,156,418, according to the 2023 Greene County budget.
Opened in 2021, the 80-cell jail was the subject of much controversy and sometimes heated debates because officials wanted to build it in Coxsackie instead of in Catskill, the Greene County seat. Opponents held rallies on the steps of the Greene County Courthouse to urge lawmakers to scrap the $46 million project, arguing the social shift in incarceration would make the building obsolete.
Construction was funded with a $39 million bond from Robert W. Baird & Co. and an $8.1 million contribution from the county. At the time, Greene County Legislature Chairman Patrick Linger, R-New Baltimore, said the project came in $500,000 under budget.
The building is designed for direct supervision, where one officer at a post within the pod is capable of monitoring up to 32 inmates. One “floater” officer and security footage also provide surveillance and supervision.
In the old jail, corrections officers had to walk up and down rows of cells to monitor inmates, because cells were arranged in a linear fashion.
Because of the design of the building, the jail has no solitary confinement cells.
“You will never see a number greater than zero on a segregated confinement report,” Groden said. “I think that’s a good thing.”
Recent jail population counts show a racial balance that does not reflect the demographics of the county, according to data collected by Vera Institute of Justice, an independent nonprofit national research and policy organization.
According to Vera, in Greene County, 6.3% of county residents are Black, but in contrast, on any given day in June 2020, 27% of jail inmates in the jail were black.