Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series examining the use of jail space by local law enforcement. Tomorrow’s article will look at how officers are forced to seek beds in other counties when space in the Southeast Ohio Regional Jail runs out.

Time lost transporting drunks and other arrested people to the Southeast Ohio Regional Jail in Nelsonville decreases the presence of law enforcement officers on the streets of Athens and the Ohio University campus, local police said.

“It’s a time-consuming thing to go to Nelsonville,” said interim Chief Mark Mathews of the Ohio University Police Department. “We need to keep officers on campus as much as possible.”

On a busy weekend, two Athens Police Department officers might transport 18 people to the regional jail on two separate trips, APD Captain Tom Pyle said. These officers are then off the street for at least an hour.

The only holding cell facilities in Athens County are located in the regional jail, which opened in April 1998 in Nelsonville. The five-room holding cell area holds a total of 19 people, including a “drunk tank,” which gives people with intoxication charges time to sober up. One room usually is set aside to function as the “drunk tank,” but other cells also can be used for this purpose.

People are released from the “drunk tank” after no more than six hours or when a sober person is able to pick them up, said APD Chief Richard Mayer. The other four rooms separate people arrested on other charges and those waiting to be processed.

Women must be housed separately from men, further complicating the use of holding cell space at the regional jail. Jail officers try to reserve one holding cell for females but re-arrange the use of the rooms as the circumstances demand, said jail warden Jeff Gillespie.

Officers of the OUPD, APD and Athens County Sheriff’s Office try to issue citations for arrest and release people, as opposed to making arrests, whenever possible to avoid the time and cost of taking people up to the regional jail, officials at each department said.

When dealing with drinking charges, this means releasing an intoxicated person to a sober friend, Mathews said. People with intoxication charges are transported to the holding cells when they are too violent to be released immediately, are too drunk to give officers a phone number or cannot find anyone who is sober to pick them up.

Local police would welcome a variety of solutions to the problems caused by having holding cells in Nelsonville.

“Anything inside the city of Athens would be better for keeping officers on duty,” Mathews said.

APD’s Mayer would like to use the old county jail cells, the two floors above the Sheriff’s Office, for a drunk tank. The space is being used for records storage by the Athens County Court of Common Pleas and evidence storage by the Sheriff’s Office.

Mayer and Sheriff Vern Castle said staffing the facility, finding other storage areas and updating the cells to meet new jail standards might be prohibitively expensive.

Pyle said opening the Athens County Court of Common Pleas holding facilities in the basement of the Sheriff’s Office building on the weekends would relieve the problem of distant holding cells and the lack of bed space in the regional jail. Although these cells are used on Halloween for that purpose and county judges are “amiable” to the idea, the city might not have the funds to staff them every weekend, he said.