Jail crowding appears to be "an ongoing challenge" for every Tennessee county, not just Greene County, according to Hamblen County Mayor David Purkey.

"It's a challenge we all have," Purkey said in a telephone interview with The Greeneville Sun on Friday. "I don't talk to a single county mayor or sheriff who doesn't have an overcrowded jail."

Purkey, along with Cocke County Mayor Iliff McMahan and Washington County Mayor George Jaynes were interviewed separately by the Sun this week about jail crowding problems their counties have faced or are facing. Greene County Sheriff Steve Burns was also interviewed for this article.

The interviews were prompted by the Sept. 12 certification/decertification deadline that Greene County has been given by the Tennessee Corrections Institute (TCI) because of ongoing crowding and related issues at the Greene County Detention Center, or jail, located on East Depot Street behind the county courthouse.

The county's workhouse on Summer Street remains certified by the TCI and is not under a decertification threat.

"Every county is in the same boat," Sheriff Burns said Wednesday. In county after county, he added, "Typically, if schools are starting to get overcrowded, so are jails."

He noted that Jefferson County has built a new justice center to deal with overcrowding, and Hawkins County has nearly finished converting the former Kmart on U.S. Highway 11W into a justice center for the same reason.

Sullivan County finished a major addition to its jail a year ago, and "it's already full," Sheriff Burns said.

Last week, the Greene County Commission approved spending $20,000 to do core drillings and a preliminary environmental study on a 54-acre tract that has been offered to the county for $1.3 million.

The purpose of the drilling is to see if the site would be suitable for a justice center. The county has not committed to buying the property but has an option to do so.

The site is located at the intersection of Hal Henard Road and U.S. Highway 11E.

Commissioner Jerry Weems, who is chairing the combined efforts of the three commission committees studying the situation, has said the consensus of those commitees (Law Enforcement, Courthouse/Workhouse, and Budget and Finance) is that a new jail and justice center on a new site is probably the county's best option.

But, he and others freely acknowledge, there is no consensus among the commission members yet on jail size, or how to fund a new facility.

Sheriff Burns has told the commission that he thinks enough actual progress has been made to enable him to plead the county's case successfully before the TCI in Nashville in a few days and retain jail certification while the progress continues.

But the sheriff also has said that movement toward a solution to the local jail overcrowding problem has to continue if TCI certification is to be preserved.

Two years ago, Hamblen County added 100 beds to its jail after a year-long period of "decertification," Mayor Purkey said.

The 100-bed addition to the 1970s justice center cost about $1.5 million, and brought the total number of beds to 255, he said.

Even so, he said, "We're still overcrowded -- but everybody's overcrowded."

Hamblen County has "an active jail study committee" appointed by the chairman of the Hamblen County Commission, that is "looking at alternatives" to building a bigger jail, he said.

Purkey added that the committee is looking at alternative sentencing and alternative monitoring.

"Talk to anyone that has built a justice center in the last five years," Purkey said, and you'll find that "they're overcrowded again."

"We know we can't build our way out of jail problems," he said. "I've never heard a sheriff say, 'We built it (a new jail) just right.' "

Purkey started his career in law enforcement serving in the court system and spending five years as a state trooper and an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation before assuming his current position in 1995.

He said every county he knows about has started the process hoping to build a jail big enough to handle the next 15 or 20 years, "but the reality is, in a year or two, you're full again."

Hamblen County issued a note for the $1.5 million addition and increased the property tax levy to the debt service fund to pay for the note, he said.

Mayor Purkey said that Hamblen County kept the same number of state inmates at the same state reimbursement rate during the year that its justice center was "decertified."

He said the county receives about $800,000 per year for housing post-trial state-custody inmates, but the budget for the jail and the Sheriff's Department is about $5 million.

"You can see that we subsidize those departments a lot with property tax revenues," he said.

Washington County Mayor George Jaynes has presided over a $25 million justice center expansion that was initially triggered by overcrowding.

The justice center expansion, now under construction, will include seven courtrooms and all court-related offices, and will add 240 beds to the jail, for a total of 560 beds, Mayor Jaynes said.

"When we get it done, it will still be overcrowded," the mayor said Wednesday in a telephone interview from his office in Jonesborough.

Jaynes said Washington County was able to delay loss of certification "for a year-and-a-half or two years" while the improvements were in the planning stages. But finally, the Tennessee Corrections Institute "put the order to us that we had to do something or lose our certification," he said.

At that point, the Washington County Commission had to come up with funding. The TCI "gave us 60 days; we had no choice," Jaynes said.

"It required a big property tax increase," he said. He said a tax hike that totaled 56 cents included not only the justice center and jail, but also two new schools at roughly $25 million each, and two $12 million high school renovations.

Jaynes said the jail budget is just over $5 million per year, and the sheriff's office budget is almost $5.5 million, to which several smaller, related budgets are added.

"The state makes the laws" about jail crowding, Jaynes said, adding, "They ought to be the ones that have to pay" the costs of compliance.

Jaynes said he thinks Greene County Sheriff Burns should be commended for trying to make the best of the current situation by attempting to find a way to generate part of the cost of a new jail by building it large enough to house 200 more federal inmates than the average of 80 now being housed.

"I hope he can do that," the Washington County mayor said.

Jaynes noted that, to offset costs, Washington County also houses large numbers of federal inmates on a regular, ongoing basis because of the higher federal reimbursement rate of $48 per day.

Federal marshals, he said, have got so many prisoners in custody awaiting trial or sentencing "that they don't care where they [the prisoners] go."

Washington County also has about 150 prisoners who are in pre-trial custody of the Tennessee Department of Corrections, Jaynes said, adding, "We can't get rid of them."

Occasionally, he said, the state will call Washington County "and tell us that they can take 10 prisoners" and transport them to prison. When that happens, "We get rid of them (the prisoners) immediately," Jaynes said.

But he pointed out that, because of crowding in state prisons, those kinds of phone calls don't come often enough.

Even if Washington County did not have any state-custody prisoners, Jaynes said he is convinced that inmates charged with misdemeanors and probation violations would soon fill the jail anyway, and he pointed out that the county gets no reimbursement for those prisoners.

He noted that Johnson City, which is not required to have a jail, has one anyway, and has a contract with the state to house female inmates because of the higher reimbursement that comes with them.

Cocke County Mayor Iliff McMahan is in a different position from Hamblen and Washington counties:

His jail has been decertified by the TCI for more than two years, and the county's legislative body, or CLB, as the county commission is called there, is still deliberating about what to do.

Cocke County's small jail was decertified by the Tennessee Corrections Institute early in 2006 after the CLB failed to approve funding for a jail study, McMahan explained.

When he took office in 2002, he said, he soon learned that the county's jail, part of which is 78 years old, had never been certified.

The jail had "a lot of issues" over and above the overcrowding issue, he said, including problems with the building itself, and problems with staffing and contraband getting in.

Jail problems were so serious that the entire Sheriff's Department was in jeopardy of losing its liability insurance, according to Mayor McMahan.

Loss of its insurance would have meant that Cocke County inmates would have had to be housed elsewhere, with the county paying the tab.

Counties in Tennessee are required by law to have sheriff's departments, he said, so steps were taken to address everything that could be addressed in the existing building to keep from losing the liability insurance.

"We could not address overcrowding," he said, but Cocke County made enough progress on the other jail-related problems to deal with the insurance crisis -- and a side benefit came when the TCI certified the jail for the first time in 2004, despite its overcrowded conditions.

Mayor McMahan said Melody Gregory, the TCI inspector, said she gave Cocke County credit for what it had been able to achieve, although the jail was still overcrowded.

Then in 2005, he said, a "justice center task force" was formed with representatives of the District Attorney's office, local judges, the Sheriff's Department, the Newport Police Department, the county attorney, the state Department of Children's Services and some County Legislative Body members.

In late 2005, the CLB was asked by the task force to appropriate $50,000 for a feasibility study that would have led to the county's building a jail and justice center on one of four sites, McMahan said.

He explained that the jail itself, with 125 beds, was at that point projected to cost $10 million, plus another $7 million for the justice center.

The CLB "cut the request to $30,000, and then didn't pass it," McMahan said.

He continued, "It's clear to me, if we don't build the jail," Cocke County will be headed back toward the same situation it faced in 2002 [lacking TCI certification].

McMahan said that it is his "feeling" that the CLB will ultimately provide funding for the jail, but not the justice center.

"The commissioners I talk to understand that the problem is in our lap," and has to be dealt with, he said.

He said most commissioners understand that, if nothing is done, eventually a court will intervene.

If that happens, he said, the cost to Cocke County "will be at least 50 percent more" than it would be if the county builds the kind of jail the task force has tried to specify.

McMahan said Cocke County would have to raise property taxes to build a new jail, but the county would also take advantage of a state law passed last year that he said allows litigation fees on court documents to be raised to $50.

The litigation fee law allows up to $25 of the fee to be applied to upgrading courthouse security, McMahan said, but "we're proposing putting the entire $50 to jail construction."