Portsmouth's jail dilemma

Not even Sheriff Bill Watson, who runs the place, thinks it’s a good use of real estate to keep a jail on Portsmouth’s waterfront. But apparently it’s a fine idea to house prisoners there.

As The Pilot’s Dave Forster reported recently, something odd has been going on in the numbers at the city jail.

A few months after the feds stopped sending prisoners there — following an escape — the city stopped sending its quota of inmates to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail near Victory Boulevard.

In other words, Portsmouth was keeping its prisoners on the waterfront.

The obvious reason is that inmates rain down a little scratch from Richmond —between $4 and $12 each, per day. Since the costs at the city jail are pretty much fixed, every extra prisoner means a few more bucks.

Where the city docks its inmates wouldn’t make much difference except for one inconvenient fact: Portsmouth has already paid for beds at the regional jail, which it shares with Norfolk, Newport News and Hampton.

Starting a few months after the escape, the city began sending an average of 211 prisoners per day to the regional jail instead of the 250 it already paid for. That has taken state funding from the regional facility.

It also means Portsmouth is paying good money for jail beds it is not using.

Instead, the sheriff’s office has been keeping those prisoners in the city jail, which has been struggling to justify its existence.

For good reason.

It makes little sense for Portsmouth to have two jails within city borders. Especially when everyone agrees that the waterfront jail long ago outlived its usefulness. There may be an argument for building a new city jail if it’s substantially cheaper than expanding the regional jail.

As we’ve pointed out before, the sheriff has grounds to feel strongly about that equation. He wants a new city jail because he runs that facility. He wants to run the jail because it guarantees employment for his deputies. But a new jail is likely to be monstrously expensive, especially when a perfectly good regional jail is just a few miles up the road — and apparently has some unused beds.