Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall has said he "fully [expects]" the coronavirus pandemic to hit Nashville's jails. For now, he and other criminal justice officials are working to lower the number of people who will be locked in the jail with the virus when it comes.
"As I’m sure you have heard, inmates throughout the country are extremely vulnerable to COVID-19," Hall writes in a letter sent to Davidson County General Sessions and state trial court judges Friday morning. "Therefore, I need a substantial reduction in the Davidson County inmate population. We all know about 'social distancing' by now. Unfortunately, that is next to impossible in jails. What is possible is to reduce the population to a level that creates significant isolation opportunities."
The idea is twofold. Releasing older and otherwise particularly vulnerable inmates could decrease the chances that people in Nashville's jails will die of the novel coronavirus that is killing thousands globally every day. It also, as Hall suggests in his letter, makes it more feasible for jail officials to isolate inmates from one another when the virus shows up inside.
The Tennessee Supreme Court yesterday ordered local judges to submit plans for reducing local jail populations by Monday, March 30.
Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk and Metro Public Defender Martesha Johnson have been working on agreements to secure early release for dozens of vulnerable inmates serving sentences in Nashville. As of Thursday, based on notes collected from various courtrooms, Funk tells the Scene that roughly 73 people have been released through that process so far.
Hall tells the Scene that in total, the number of people in his custody is down 120 or 130 over the past couple of weeks.
“We’ve seen a reduction in our jail population, but it’s not where it needs to be,” Hall says. In his letter to judges, his count as of Friday was 1,109. He'd like to get it below 1,000.
The reduction so far is due to several simultaneous policy changes in addition to the early release efforts led by prosecutors and public defenders.
“I view the jail, as it relates to our population, as kind of like a bathtub," Hall tells the Scene. "We have a faucet and we have the drain of release. The faucet being the intake. We need all these factions to be working. The reduction in physical arrests is a critical part, in my opinion. The law is pretty clear that you can cite misdemeanors instead of arresting them.”
Hall has emphasized the need to slow the stream of people coming into the jail for the obvious reason — it threatens to undo any progress made by releasing people early — but also because it presents an elevated risk to his staff.
“Booking is a very difficult place to prevent airborne disease and so forth,” he says. He adds that DCSO facilities are taking temperatures of staff and inmates at the front door.
The sheriff initially indicated some frustration that arrest numbers were not going down in a statement on March 21, but that has changed over the past week. Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson urged officers to use "maximum discretion" in issuing citations in lieu of arrests and Hall has seen the numbers drop.
For years, he says, a typical day in Nashville saw 100 arrests. In the past couple of years that number has gone down to around 70.
“If 70 was our norm, that’s kind of what we went into this crisis with," Hall says. "So we’re down into the 40 range right now per day, is what it looks like, and we’ve even dipped down into the 20s a couple days.”
The law also allows Hall to take some unilateral action, which he says he's done. He has furloughed some inmates who were on work release, individuals who were of particular concern because they go out into the community and then back into the jail. He also expanded the criteria for the pretrial release program he oversees, and he tells the Scene that the latest numbers show a 50 percent increase in people being released as a result.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m asking everyone to do this and put their name on risky cases with me not having done my own part,” Hall says.
He notes that the system-wide effort to reduce the jail population reminds him of a different sort of crisis some 20 years ago, when overcrowding led to the possibility of the federal government taking over Nashville's jails.
“My experience with that whole thing — and I think it’s even true today, minus [COVID-19] — is that people are afraid to put their name on the release of someone who obviously could go out or may go out and do something else," he says. "I understand that risk. But I think what we have to realize as leaders in the criminal justice world is, doing nothing is also extremely risky too.”
For elected judges, in particular, he says concerns about political blowback can lead to hesitation about granting early release.
“My feeling is we should all have some skin in the game as leaders," Hall says. "My name is on many of these and will continue to be. And I will defend what we did because I believe tomorrow, the next day and the next day we need to be finding what is a balance between the public safety risk and also the public health risk. I don’t wear just public safety glasses.”
