Crenshaw working with the numbers

One-hundred-seventy-people never made it home for the holidays over the weekend! The inmate count at the Oconee Detention Center during the Thanksgiving weekend reached 170—in a penal facility with a rated capacity of 122. Two drug sweeps in November swelled the numbers. Sheriff Mike Crenshaw and staff continue to meet with the architect and the builder to finish the design for the replacement jail. The new jail would be equipped with 192 inmate beds, but Crenshaw says he’s planning to order an extra 40-50 beds that will allow double-bunking a percentage of single-occupancy cell inmates. “This will allow us to safely house in the neighborhood of 240 inmates. I believe this will be sufficient for those times that we see peaks in our jail populations,” Crenshaw says.