Earlier this month, Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter spoke with MTN News about his plan to host public discussions about the current state of the Cascade County Detention Center and how to work toward long-term sustainability.

Cascade County Sheriff Wants Public Input on Jail Sustainability

He started those discussions with a Facebook live. event on Wednesday, October 30, 2024.

“We’ve tried almost everything we can think of since my administration took over to try different things, you know, we got rid of the state prison, we brought in the feds because we could have fewer feds that paid more, therefore reducing our population but increasing our income. Then we did the pre-trial phase, so we worked to get it going; We’ll see, that’s in its infancy, so we’ll see how it goes,” Sheriff Slaughter explained.

“We need to start looking at other solutions in the future as well, to make sure we keep the numbers where we need to, because we have to be able to take care of our public,” he said.

Of the Sheriff’s Office’s $12 million budget, only about $4 million comes from the general fund.

Basically, they could bring in additional federal prisoners to raise money; However, they no longer have enough beds for that type of admission.

“The problem is that at that level there are no beds left to arrest people from the street, and that is what worries me. How do we maintain that number? And that number will increase as our population grows,” Slaughter said.

Ideally, they would like to have around 200 beds open to allow criminals to be taken off the streets while they work to keep the jail below capacity. They are in the process of coming up with ideas to better serve the public.

“I’m an elected official, the county commissioners are an elected official; We are responsible for doing what the public wants us to do. “We want to hear what the public wants and then it’s our job to make it happen,” Slaughter added.

They will continue to seek public input to figure out how to properly run the jail and achieve long-term sustainability.