BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

CANTON -- St. Lawrence County’s sheriff says the jail is filling up quickly, defying statewide trends, and the county may soon have to pay to have inmates housed at other facilities.

Sheriff Brooks Bigwarfe discussed the issue with the St. Lawrence County legislature’s Operations Committee during their Monday, Oct. 19 meeting.

He said as of the morning of Oct. 19, the facility was housing 120 inmates. At the rate the inmate population has grown since the summer, he anticipates hitting their maximum capacity in the next month or two.

“The trend is really going upward,” Bigwarfe said. “It’s probably a three-to-one ratio of people going into the facility than going out.”

He blames this on several factors -- an increase in parolees being held for alleged violations of their release, people not showing up to court and people involved in either the sale of drugs, or committing crimes to finance their drug habits.

Bigwarfe said there are now 32 parolees being held in Canton, most of whom may not immediately go back to state prison. That’s because they’re held on charges for a new offense, and the state does not take them back until the new case resolves.

The sheriff and Probation Director Tim LePage both cited what they described as a “boomerang effect” of the bail reform that took effect this year. Most defendants are released with orders to reappear in court, with significantly fewer being held pending the outcome of the case.

“Local courts have been shut down the last six to eight months, and they opened back up in August, and that’s when the numbers started to spike,” LePage said.

He also pointed to some people being held in jail because of probation violations.

“We weren’t drug testing for a while. We started drug testing again,” LePage said. “Unfortunately when we did start testing, we had a lot of positives … A lot of them are being evaluated for chemical dependency.”

The sheriff noted that St. Lawrence County leads the state in meth arrests.

“There’s a big-time meth problem and drug problem in St. Lawrence County. Per capita, St. Lawrence County is number one in meth arrests,” Bigwarfe said. “We have a problem in this county. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. You just can’t arrest your way out of it.”

“There needs to be treatment, there needs to be education, there needs to be enforcement,” he said. “I’d say 70% of the people in jail are drug-related. They’re drug sellers or users.”

Legislator Margaret Haggard, D-Potsdam, asked if there is an option to release some people on electronic home monitoring instead of holding them in the county jail. LePage said they have plenty of resources to do that, but the problem is the inmates aren’t eligible for the program.

“It’s definitely not a numbers issue. We have plenty of units we can use,” he said. “There are certain requirements they have to qualify for. The probation violations (themselves) are one of them. There are only six violators in there now. We have considered them for the program [based on] criminal history, what they did to get in there.”

On top of all of that, Bigwarfe and the jail staff are doing everything they can to stop COVID-19 from getting into the jail and spreading.

“We’re getting such a big influx, it’s making it really hard to make sure this COVID is staying out of the jail. We’ve done everything we can,” the sheriff said. “We’re trying to do everything possible to keep it out of that facility.”