Juvenile Detention Facility scrambling with full house

The Juvenile Detention Facility is still suffering from a long string of turnover, and are still working on what the next step is going to be.

The facility still needs to fill a new position, but they’re also looking at transitioning with the Sheriff’s Department taking over. If the Sheriff’s Department isn’t going to take over, they need to look at more staffing and restructuring what they have.

According to Dallas Wamsley, the county’s human resources and payroll coordinator, some of the employees there are working full time with massive overtime to keep up with the demand of a full facility as of right now.

Since the position is on-call, it’s difficult for the facility to keep employees, Wamsley said. Many of their employees have prior commitments, part-time or full-time jobs, and with an on-call position they never know what their schedule or paycheck is going to be.

“It’s hard to say what a regular schedule is for them, because they never have a regular schedule,” Wamsley said. “It’s not like the Sheriff’s Department where they always have inmates. We could go a month or two without having a child in the facility, and then we can go six months and we have one full-time person in there. It’s a lot of work.”

This has been a problem for years, Wamsley said.

“We can’t get commitments if we can’t get employees,” Wamsley said. “This needs to become one of our top priorities to really refocus and see what we’re going to be doing.”

At the Sept. 7 Lincoln County Commissioners meeting, the sheriff’s officers approached the commissioners with a proposal to take over the Troy juvenile detention facility that is currently under the commissioner’s direction, hire a larger staff and turn the facility into a potential revenue stream by attracting inmates from nearby counties.

Their proposal is still up in the air, Wamsley said, and they need to figure out what they’re going to be doing quickly.

The next step is to meet with the Sheriff’s Department and discuss what their take is on it, and whether or not they want to take over the facility. They are also working on getting figures on the revenue that it brings in and how many children they have on a regular basis.