SARSOTA COUNTY, Fla. — In Sarasota County, one commissioner says the jail population has reached an “emergency” level. Numbers given to Spectrum News by the sheriff’s office confirm the situation: they are housing nearly 300 more inmates than what the facility was built for.
County Commissioner Tom Knight says this has been a problem for 30 years. It’s a problem the previous sheriff tried to solve. Documents from 2019 show the sheriff’s office presented a $100 million plan to reconstruct the facility.
But now, six years later, those plans have ballooned to as much as $700 million and still, no solid direction is in place…