A day of reckoning will demand solutions to Vanderburgh County's perpetually overpopulated jail, Sheriff Dave Wedding believes -- but local election candidates and policymakers are in no hurry for it.

Candidates for the Board of Commissioners -- the executive body that would make the decision to add on to the $35 million lockup off Harlan Avenue with funding from the County Council --  vow to exhaust all alternatives for reducing inmate population first. They and policymakers such as Commissioner Bruce Ungethiem and Wedding do not mention, unless asked, the specter of having to build a third jail pod that could cost as much as $15 million. The jail has two X-shaped pods with 256 beds each.

"In the long term, we're going to have to bite the bullet and put in a new pod," said Ungethiem, president of the Board of Commissioners.

But that likely has to be a long-term solution. A state law requires local governments to seek referendums for proposed non-school building projects costing more than $12 million in public funds. The next year such a referendum could be held in conjunction with a local election -- that is, without costing taxpayers extra -- is 2018.

County officials have turned in several directions for help in pursuit of money, alternative facilities and new ideas for reducing the jail's population in a bid to stave off that expensive solution. Ungethiem said he recently met representatives of a company that designs and builds jails in search of a less expensive option such as dormitory-style housing or housing made of relatively inexpensive jail construction materials. At a meeting with state legislators and U.S. Rep. Larry Bucshon this month, local officials beseeched the politicians to help any way they can.

Wedding has been forced to employ half-measures such as strategically placed "sled beds" -- thin mattresses mounted by small plastic frames a few inches off the floor -- and sending inmates to other jails just to keep his head above water. Inmates have been wedged into cells, putting them over the capacity for which they were designed.

In a dire letter sent to U.S. Sen. Dan Coats in August, the sheriff decried a jail overcrowding "crisis" and asked for help.

Wedding's letter struck a tone of desperation, laying out a litany of circumstances driving up jail population and including a number plainly meant to be eye-popping. The jail, built in 2005, has an operational capacity of 440 inmates, the sheriff wrote. But now-routine overcrowding resulted in jailers having to find room for 706 inmates one day in June.

"I need your help!" Wedding wrote. "I have worked tirelessly with our local prosecutor, judges, the County Commissioners, the County Council, and mental health professionals to come up with solutions to reduce our jail population and treat the mentally ill. I am unable to put many of our plans in motion without necessary funding!"

Wedding has said local elected officials make it clear they don't want to "add on" to the jail, especially if that comes with anything near a $15 million price tag. But the sheriff, who vows not to release potentially dangerous inmates, can see the day when there will be no choice.

"It's not necessarily that I'm in favor of it, but I think you have to do what's right," he said. "If our inmate population stays above what it's built for, what we're rated for maximum capacity and well above operational capacity, then I would say we have no choice.

"If you have a flat tire, are you going to drive from here to Henderson on a flat tire, or are you going to change it? You've got to fix the problem."

'We built it too small'

The jail was built a decade ago with expansion in mind. The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Building Authority, which owns the facility and the land on which it sits, said then that the ground had been graded for expansion, the utilities extended and the necessary drawings done. The kitchen, power plant and booking room were built to handle the extra inmates that a third pod would bring.

But the County Council was wary of taking on debt to issue a bond for more than $35 million, meaning the facility was built with just two pods.

That was a mistake, Ungethiem and Commissioner Steve Melcher now say.

"The reality is that when we commissioned the building of the jail and when we completed the jail, it was already at capacity. And that's not a good plan for the future," Ungethiem said.

Melcher is even more blunt.

"We built it too small day one, and everybody knew it," he said during a recent candidates debate.

Melcher said the jail could have taken on federal inmates and used the payments received to pay off the $35 million bond the county issued for the jail in 2004.

But local officials could not have foreseen a change to state law dictating that low-level felons who still have at least a year to serve once their cases are adjudicated must remain in county jails rather than go to state prisons. They could not have forecast the subsequent explosions of heroin and methamphetamine-related crime.

Additionally, a lack of available beds at treatment facilities for the mentally ill has left some Indiana courts unable to avoid sending mentally ill individuals to county jails. Vanderburgh County's jail wasn't designed to treat mentally ill inmates and isn't staffed with workers trained for the task, Wedding wrote to Coats.

"We are now faced with a perfect storm of over-crowding, under-staffing and under-service of the mentally ill," the sheriff wrote. "We are putting people with profound mental illnesses in crowded cells with inadequate supervision."

There's not much Wedding and other county officials haven't tried to relieve the problem.

Ungethiem recalled working with the sheriff and judges on a pilot program that saw non-violent inmates fitted with ankle bracelets so they wouldn't have to be housed in the jail. But the offenders kept getting arrested, he said.

"They didn't seem to realize that we were giving them a chance not to be in jail as long as they behaved themselves -- and they didn't behave themselves," he said.

Despite attempts to bring down the jail population through home detention programs and work release, roughly 40 or more of the jail's inmates are housed at Vanderburgh County's expense in jails in Knox, Daviess and Pike counties.

There is no small irony now in the impact of the Legislature's decision to foist low-level felons on county jails, Ungethiem said. And just maybe, there is an opportunity.

"Now the state has open bed space in some of their prisons," he said. "That's actually what they did it for. They were trying to alleviate their overcrowding situation. Well, they didn't solve the problem. They just moved it from the state level to the local level.

"So we're asking the state, 'Can you take some of these longer-term people, some of these people that really need to be incarcerated for a period of time, off of our hands?'"

Ungethiem floated the idea -- the hope -- that legislators might come across with some money for a mental health facility, perhaps a separate wing of the jail for such inmates.

It is indicative of the urgency to reduce overcrowding that Wedding feels that he recently approached Building Authority Director Dave Rector with a brainchild.

"He wanted me to look at seeing, can we use the Community Corrections building out there -- the work release building -- if we can convert that into confinement for immediate relief?" Rector said. "And then you'd just build a smaller corrections building out of different construction materials. It would be a lot cheaper."

The idea is still on the table, Rector said.

The candidates say...

Perhaps wary of being linked to a big spending project in an election environment, candidates for the Board of Commissioners have insisted the county must exhaust all other options before adding on to the jail.

"We need to listen to everyone," said Ben Shoulders, Democrat candidate in District 1. "This is a community problem, and it will take a community solution."

Shoulders' opponent, Republican Sean Selby, acknowledges the jail isn't big enough, but he, too, wants to exhaust alternatives.

"We have to be willing to look at all those different options, and be willing to say, 'Is that going to help us reduce the population enough that we don't have to build?' It's weighing that," Selby said.

Running for re-election in District 3, Democrat Melcher said the county can't afford to build a new pod now -- but officials shouldn't rule out making a planned new $1.6 million sheriff’s operation center a little bigger to accommodate confinement space. The operations center will be on-site with the jail. The current command post, located at 5607 N. U.S. 41, annually costs the county $104,000 in rent payments.

Wedding said the new operations center isn't intended for confinement. The facility will be "for patrol, criminal investigations, sexual offender registry, school liaisons, civil process, things like that. But it has nothing to do with the jail," the sheriff said.

But Melcher said Wedding shouldn't be so quick to rule out his idea.

"That's what he says, but we ought to look at all the options before deciding," Melcher said. "Why not explore it while we've got the opportunity? It would be more expensive to wait and do it later."

Melcher's opponent, Republican Cheryl Musgrave, speaks of "the larger problems that put people in jail to begin with." Jail isn't the right place for individuals whose real problems are drug or alcohol abuse or mental illness, Musgrave said.

Who would pay for the necessary treatment and detention?

"That's the part of the puzzle that everybody needs to work out," Musgrave said. "I know that there are many groups that are working on this problem, and what I'm saying is that I will listen to them."

Ungethiem rejected the idea that jail overcrowding has reached a boiling point. Asked how he sees the next few months playing out, he paused. There is no sure answer.

"That's going to depend on how much criminal activity we've got," he said.

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