Local law enforcement officials — from police chiefs, to the sheriff to the district attorney — believe plans for the new Lancaster County prison must include a space that streamlines the booking process that follows an arrest.
All they need to do to make it happen is to get one of the Republican county commissioners on board.
Lancaster County Sheriff Chris Leppler said Friday he supports including a central booking unit in the prison plans, as did President Judge Leonard G. Brown III and District Attorney Heather Adams.
“I see a true central processing unit as critical to public safety so that transporting officers are able to get back to their jurisdiction as soon as possible,” Adams said via email Friday.
A central booking facility at the new prison would eliminate the need for police officers from around the county to make multiple stops after making an arrest. Instead of transporting an arrestee to two or three locations to process them into the justice system, it would allow all of that to happen in one place.
While the booking unit was included in the original prison plans, the county’s two Republican commissioners, Josh Parsons and Ray D’Agostino, last year called for changes to the plan in an effort to save money on a project that was already projected to cost $400 million. The booking unit and several other components were separated from the rest of the design plan and labeled as optional add-ons.
West Lampeter Township police Chief Brian Wiczkowski, president of the Lancaster County Police Chiefs Association, and Mount Joy Borough police Chief Robert Goshen spoke before the county prison board on Thursday. They noted in detail the shortcomings of the county’s current booking system and said a new central facility would be a major benefit, particularly to police officers and detainees.
The final decision on whether to include the booking unit in the prison rests with the three county commissioners, one of whom, Democratic Commissioner Alice Yoder, has publicly supported the idea since it was included in the prison’s initial designs. Commissioners Josh Parsons and Ray D’Agostino have not committed to the idea.
Other elements of the new prison put into the optional bucket included some classroom space, seven medical beds, a work release unit and storage space for maintenance equipment.
Parsons and D’Agostino said those parts of the plan could be included in initial construction if the price is right, or built later under future county commissioners.
County officials declined last year to say how much the potential cuts could save the county and presented no documents outlining details of the alternate plans when commissioners approved them in December.
The initial designs consisted of 430,000 square feet of prison space with 994 beds, less than an earlier estimate of 1,212 beds. County officials are in the midst of reviewing submissions for a construction manager in the new prison project.
A ‘broken system’
In their presentation Thursday, Wiczkowski and Goshen described how the current patchwork system of processing people arrested by police and then committing them to Lancaster County Prison can in some cases tie up police for long periods, leading to fewer officers on patrol at a given time.
“Our resources are really being, frankly, wasted because of this,” Wiczkowski said at the prison board meeting.
The steps police need to take from arrest to arraignment or imprisonment vary by jurisdiction.
On one side of the spectrum, individual police departments have sole responsibility for completing all paperwork and testing after an arrest, getting them before a judge and transporting them to jail if necessary.
Other counties have developed a more centralized system, creating efficiencies that allow criminal defendants to be arraigned in minutes, not hours or days, and getting police back on patrol, the chiefs said.
Instead of making multiple stops to perform several functions before committing a defendant to prison — for instance, taking fingerprints at the police station, transporting defendants to the district court office for arraignment and then finally dropping them off at prison — everything is done in one location, the chiefs said.
Berks, York, Dauphin, Centre and Cumberland are among the counties in the commonwealth that operate central booking units, according to their websites.
Goshen spent more than 20 years with the York city police department. “Coming over from York County to over here, it’s like learning a different language,” the Mount Joy police chief said Friday.
Lancaster County has developed an ad hoc central system for police officers to book defendants at Lancaster County Prison when district judge offices are closed. But the space used for booking is not separated from the prison, so regular lockdowns mean police officers are stuck in the facility and can’t leave until all prisoners in the building are accounted for.
Other benefits
The chiefs also said a more comprehensive central booking facility would better divert defendants to other services, rather than leaving them in jail until the courts and law enforcement figure out whether they need, for example, drug rehabilitation or a mental health bed.
A central facility also could aggregate different databases to get more biographical information on defendants, the chiefs said. That would give officers and judges a fuller picture sooner of what issues the defendant may be dealing with, and potentially faster ways to get them access to care, they said.
A faster processing time for defendants also means they’re less likely to have their lives turned upside down for being picked up on a minor bench warrant, for instance. Not everyone has paid time off, and people can lose their jobs if they miss a day of work, Goshen said.
“Obviously we have to hold you accountable, but we don’t have to crush you,” Goshen said. “And if we can get you in and out of the system in a few minutes, why wouldn’t you try to gravitate to that?
Goshen and Wiczkowski acknowledged central booking would require the county to provide additional staffing and resources to run it.
At Thursday’s meeting, Warden Cheryl Steberger said she also supported the idea.
“I wanted you to hear it from me also: I definitely am for it,” the warden said.
