Both the N&R and Rhino write up Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes’ problem keeping jailers at the new $100 million county jail.
Barnes tells Scott Yost the problems stem from county commissioners refusal of his request to hire an additional 89 guards in preparation for the new jail’s opening:
Barnes said he wishes the commissioners had let him have the guards earlier in the process so they could have had more training prior to being thrown in the job.
“I asked them to let them train before the new jail opening, but they didn’t want to do that, so we essentially had to fill 89 positions at the end of the process,” Barnes said.
Capt. Kenneth Watkins, who’s worked with the county’s detention officers for over two decades, said it’s a lot different supervising jail inmates than supervising regular employees.
He said he thinks a lot of the recent turnover is due to the speed with which Guilford County hired new guards in the effort to open the new jail.
“Anytime you hire that many people in a short span of time, you will see this,” he said of the high turnover rate.
Watkins added that many of the detention officers the county has hired recently are people “looking for a job, not a career.”
Meanwhile Joe Killian reports that two floors —“with its 500 monitoring cameras, 1,700 electronic security doors and video hookups for inmates to talk to visitors without ever needing to leave their section — remain closed for lack of funding.” With a $41 million budget deficit, commissioners might not be inclined to provide further funding.
