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County Board Chair’s Solution for Jail Overcrowding

By Chase Porter Jul 26, 2023 | 12:54 PM

The Lancaster County Jail has been overcrowded for several months, and Commissioners have a plan to address the dilemma.

Lancaster County Board Chair Christa Yoakum appeared on Tuesdays episode of the Dan Parsons Show, and spoke to guest-host Doug Fitzgerald who asked Yoakum where the commission was at in addressing jail overcrowding. Yoakum said they will implement a short-term and long-term approach.

“The short term plan is to house people in other jails,” said Yoakum, “Our director went out to several other jails to be sure they were up to the housing standards we want to provide, and did settle on Washington County. Their jail would be good for some of the women, that’s particularly the population that we had some emergency need to house.”

Expressing the ethos of the issue, “It would not be humane to keep people in our jail that might have to sleep on the floor or some situation like that. We want them to be in a humane situation,” said Yoakum.

The long-term solution takes a wider look at the cycle of correctional services. “The longer term is really more of an evaluation of our justice system. From their very first encounter with law enforcement, all the way through the courts, all the way through sentencing.” Yoakum believes it’s, “better certainly to divert people out of jail, get them into our community corrections programs, when appropriate. That’s where I’d like to see us grow things.”

The County Chairwoman says this approach must be strategic, “We need to evaluate what’s the programming that’s currently working…and how do we grow programming effectively? None of us want to see someone who really is a danger to the community not being jailed. There is a place for that. But many of the people who are in our jail are not a danger, they really need behavioral changes. That’s what we should be working towards.”

Fitzgerald asked Yoakum to illustrate what prevention and proactive correctional services looks like. She said, “We just hired a new community corrections director, who has a lot of experience in diversion. I believe that the programs we have are good, but we need to evaluate to be sure that we’re moving in the right direction…with his vast knowledge, that certainly will add to what we can possibly do.”