Montgomery County officials say the jump in pack robberies — roaming gangs of youths ripping off people’s wallets and cell phones at gunpoint — along with a rise in other violent crimes, has caused the jail population to boom.
Since April, the county’s inmate population has skyrocketed back to a historical peak set in summer 2006.
When jail officials first took notice of the trend in May, it was not clear what had caused the jump, but on Wednesday Department of Corrections Director Arthur Wallenstein told The Examiner, “there’s no crime wave causing the rise, but growth in more serious offenses means fewer people making bail and more staying longer.”
And in cases involving pack robberies, one crime can mean four or five inmates, Wallenstein said.
While the number of overall arrests has changed little from previous years, the number of arrests for murder have jumped from three to eight, rape from 10 to 16 and robberies from 108 to 122 in the first quarter of this year over the same period in 2007.
All of these factors combined have caused the inmate population to climb from 1,000 at the beginning of the year to more than 1,100 by the end of June, jail statistics show.
Within the last month, an additional unit of the jail had to be opened for several days to house the inmate influx, boosting overtime costs, Wallenstein said. The county also stopped accepting federal male inmates five months ago. “We wouldn’t allow them to crowd the jail,” he said.
Meanwhile, Montgomery County remains an aberration among other suburban jails in the region.
The overcrowded, problem-plagued Prince George’s jail’s population has hovered around 1,350 for months, officials said. Fairfax County officials said their population has gone down slightly from a peak of about 1,360 earlier this year to about 1,343 this month.
Prince William couldn’t provide an exact count of its population, but officials said the population has grown, but done so steadily.
“This isn’t a crisis,” Wallenstein said. “We recognized the issue early and we need to be looking to the future so we don’t run out of space and endanger employees and inmates with overcrowded conditions.”
