ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN — The St. Mary’s County Commissioners are facing a dilemma of how to expand the current St. Mary’s County Jail with a three-ring circus facing them: a boiling opposition of nearby neighbors, most of whom have bought homes in two nearby subdivisions knowing full well the jail was their neighbor; the possibility of a federal judge giving them just a week to lower their inmate population to the proper capacity of the jail and a crushing fiscal crisis which could force them to lay off county employees in the coming year or face a taxpayer revolt.

St. Mary’s Sheriff Tim Cameron acted as an emcee of the public hearing on Thursday night at the Leonard Hall Governmental Center to explain the proposed expansion of the project.

After Cameron laid out the plans for the $30 million expansion, which is already in the process of being started, residents of the Academy Hills subdivision and the Single Tree neighborhood argued that the expansion was wrong for a variety of reasons, most of them being the proximity of the jail to their homes. None of those who spoke against the expansion noted that the jail was there before they bought their homes and only one resident who lived in his home prior to the construction of the jail 30 years ago had any complaint.

Glenn Mattingly told the officials that inmates coming back from work release left stolen bikes in his yard and in the morning foul language from the foot traffic of inmates leaving for jobs could be heard inside his home.

The officials said that they could work to alleviate the problems. Perhaps they could do so by arresting the inmates for stealing bikes or providing a stolen bike drop off center at the jail.

But the problems that most of the residents of Leonardtown talked about had to do with the fear of escapes.

No one actually digs a tunnel under a wall, cuts the bars out of windows or rips a hole in the roof of the jail in order to escape. In fact, the escapes the jail has had consisted of an inmate on work release showing up with beer on his breath and being told by the correctional officer who greets him at the front counter of the work release section, that he would lose his work release privileges, as the jail doesn’t intend for prisoners to go out and drink beer all day and then come back to the slammer.

At that point, the inmate simply turned around and left by the same door he came in and the cops went into their special lockdown mentality, called out the K-9 dogs, employed the nearby State Police helicopter and sent 30 cops screaming through the area with lights and sirens.

In short, the bungled police reaction to the tipsy inmate scared the living bejeevers out of the whole damn town.

And the police deserve exactly what they got on Thursday night: a community living in fear and not wanting to increase the size and scope of what already has them concerned; desperate crazed convicts holding knifes to the throats of their children after having slit the throat of the family dog and robbing stores.

The jail expansion has snuck up on the Town says Mayor Chip Norris, who says that the Town government didn’t have a clue that the jail would be expanded until monitoring a commissioners meeting in early 2006.

Reasonable people might believe that as the population expands, crime fighting is successful and judges sentence offenders to jail, that the jail might become overpopulated.

It would be hard put to explain to taxpayers who are already poised to lynch the next idiot public official who says taxes are going up, that somehow a new jail should be built about 20 miles away from the courthouses. How anyone would explain that the jail should be built as a regional or supersized facility next to their peaceful place in the country will find swarms of Killer bees more hospitable.

But not all the demand for three hots and a cot comes from local criminals as the Sheriff’s Department has been booking vacant beds at the Inn for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to accommodate an average of a dozen illegal aliens each night up until the end of October. The rational for doing so was for gaining income but Sheriff Cameron told ST. MARY’S TODAY that they have stopped the practice so as not to overcrowd the jail.

Norris says that rather than expand the jail, the county should be examining the possibility of doing a regional facility with Charles and Calvert Counties and it was revealed at the Thursday meeting that a preliminary meeting was recently held, but given the tortoise pace of government actions. Enough said.

Sheriff Cameron and Commissioner Raley both expressed the fear of a court ordering immediate relief. Commissioner Raley has been in office for 10 years and his sudden sense of urgency is dubious at best.

Norris said he was disappointed in the coordination and cooperation given the Town of Leonardtown by Commissioner Mattingly.

"We are just now being told that this is the only way to go and I have to believe they should at least examine other options," said Norris. "True, the jail has been there for years but no one thought this could grow to being a 500 bed penal institution with helicopters flying around and bloodhounds tracking prisoners through backyards."

Mattingly thoughtfully explained how residents could be notified by the reverse 911 system, noting that it costs a fortune for the county to use it.

But as usual when government acts like it has no sense, which is most of the time, no one said that calling out the National Guard for an inmate who simply opens a door and walks away is boneheaded.

Sheriff Cameron admitted that one of the ‘escapes’ was just a case of a defendant in the courtroom bolting for the door and it would be simple thing to send one deputy to his home to pick him up.

The real tragedy is that the jail doesn’t pose much of a threat at all to the surrounding communities. No one has ever conducted a real jail break and likely won’t.

But St. Mary’s Hospital being a psychiatric facility which admits crazy people brought to them by the police as posing a real danger to themselves or others and ten minutes after the cops bring in the nut cases, the hospital, which recently had one patient take her own life as she was left unsupervised, cuts the crazies loose. Once they are out the door, they are free to waltz over to some home in Singletree and rape, maraud or rob.

The sex perverts that lurk in the neighborhoods of Leonardtown can be easily revealed by checking the sex offender registry on the internet for the 20650 zip code. None of them that are in the jail pose a threat.

Those who are off their meds for bi-polar disorder and driving around the county seat are more dangerous than the inmates behind the walls of the jail.

The election of Harry S. "Lanny" Lancaster as Mayor this past spring could have brought the move of the men’s homeless shelter to Leonardtown and that bunch of crazies that the shelter attracts but don’t like the no-drinking rules and set up tent camps in wooded areas of Lexington Park next to the library and elementary school would be dangerous to Leonardtown.

Why can’t Sheriff Cameron simply erect some tents and put up a chain link fence around the encampment?

Saving on bricks and mortar and instead doing a jail campground without heat ought to dissuade those on the border about becoming a criminal to instead get a job. Think of the millions of tax dollars that could be saved. Go ahead, think about it because with the exception of Larry Jarboe, none of the other commissioners will think about it.

Sheriff Cameron says that the Sheriff in Arizona who makes the inmates wear pink jumpsuits and stay in tents in the hot desert heat is frequently the target of lawsuits. We shall have to inquire about that.

For now, it appears that the jail will be expanded and that the commissioners will go along with what Commissioner Tommy Mattingly (D. Leonardtown) wants.

For those residents of Academy Hills who apparently thought they were buying homes next to Disneyland instead of the Hotel St. Mary’s, one can only hope they are not working at jobs which are essential to our national defense.

One of them sneered as he looked down his nose at the Walled City Bumpkins and explained how the Europeans, who clearly some think are so much better than Americans, don’t put their jails in the center of towns. Of course, there are some regimes in Europe that filled up ovens and huge mass graves with prisoners but the Academy Hills resident didn’t go into that. They didn’t keep those prisoners in the town and that’s what counted.

Just when you think that government couldn’t get any more silly, just turn on Channel 95 and watch the action.

Raley said that he was going to leave office in 2 years and he accepts that the board has to make unpopular decisions as if he were auditioning for a Profiles in Courage Award.

Mattingly said that the average age of the public schools was 38 years when they took office and now its 14 years. This statement is likely just a lie and not worth adding up the countless new schools which have been opened to support his Democratic Party baloney. Go ahead, try it.

Mattingly also has said before that when he took office the county was running a deficit budget and he ought not to say it within fist distance of former Commissioner Francie Eagan who was very proud to have lowered the tax rate, fully funded education and left behind a surplus. But this nation is just now getting used to lying Democrats.

The Republicans have been quite a bit inept nationally but from 1994 to 1998 in St. Mary’s County, they ran a pretty good ship and it is very likely that they will return to control of the board in 2010, minus Kenny Dement, who hiked taxes by $14.5 million this year and said his only regret was that he couldn’t spend more money.