Doyle touts business approach to jail

Frank Doyle already had retired after 32 years as a police offi­cer and man­aged his own land­scap­ing busi­ness before he was elect­ed Clark County jail­er in 2014.

Now he’s seek­ing his fourth term against a chal­lenger who is also a for­mer police offi­cer but has not worked in cor­rec­tions. Chris Grant works for a com­pa­ny that pro­vides equip­ment and soft­ware for region­al offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Doyle believes he’s the bet­ter can­di­date because he won’t need any on-the-job train­ing. He’s been man­ag­ing the deten­tion cen­ter effec­tive­ly, he says, and was cho­sen by his peers to serve on the board of direc­tors of the Kentucky Jailers Association for the past decade.

He has been involved in pub­lic ser­vice for more than 45 years.

“If something’s not bro­ken, I don’t see any need to fix it,” Doyle said in a recent inter­view when asked why he should be elect­ed again.

“I have the expe­ri­ence, and expe­ri­ence mat­ters,” Doyle said.

Since he became jail­er, he said, he has accu­mu­lat­ed some­where between 500 and 600 hours of training.

Doyle has tried to oper­ate the Clark County Detention Center like a busi­ness. He has cre­at­ed income by bring­ing in pris­on­ers from oth­er coun­ties, as well as state and fed­er­al inmates.

He has also saved the coun­ty a great deal of mon­ey by hav­ing pris­on­ers take care of coun­ty prop­er­ty — mow­ing lawns, remov­ing snow, salt­ing side­walks, and clean­ing up the fair­grounds and ani­mal shel­ter — as well as doing the jail’s own laun­dry and food preparation.

“Since I’ve been in office . . . it’s a lit­tle over $26 mil­lion that we’ve gen­er­at­ed, and we’re get­ting bet­ter at it every year,” Doyle said.

The inmate work-release pro­gram is good for the coun­ty because it saves mon­ey, but it’s also good for the inmates because they learn job skills and respon­si­bil­i­ty, Doyle says.

“They get in here and get [them­selves] straight­ened out,” he said.

Doyle believes that reha­bil­i­ta­tion works because he’s seen peo­ple leave bet­ter than when they came in. For some, it’s the first time they’ve been free of drugs or alco­hol. They get GED class­es, Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT) train­ing. MRT is a cog­ni­tive-behav­ioral treat­ment sys­tem devel­oped in the 1980s by Dr. Gregory Little and Dr. Kenneth Robinson, for prison pop­u­la­tions resis­tant to stan­dard counseling. 

The facil­i­ty also makes vol­un­tary reli­gious ser­vices avail­able to inmates who desire it, offered by out­side organizations.

“It’s changed some lives,” said Deputy Ernie Sammons, who was with Doyle when he sat for this interview.

That day, they had inmates weed­ing and mulching plant beds at the World War II and Korean Veterans Memorial.

Doyle, 69, who goes by the nick­name “Squatty,” came here from Lexington in 1979 to work for the Winchester Police Department and bought a house in Verna Hills. He worked nights and took class­es in the day­time and grad­u­at­ed from the Department of Criminal Justice Training at Eastern Kentucky University.

At one time, he con­sid­ered going to the Kentucky State Police to be a dog han­dler, but by that time, he no longer qual­i­fied for the KSP acad­e­my because he was old­er than 35.

After he retired from the city police force, Doyle got his first expe­ri­ence in cor­rec­tions work as a deputy for Jailer Ray Sabbatine at the Fayette County Detention Center in Lexington. He worked there for three years, even­tu­al­ly train­ing oth­er deputies.

“It’s a day-and-night dif­fer­ence” between being a police offi­cer and a jail­er, he remarked.

Doyle also owned his own busi­ness for about 15 years, doing land­scap­ing, lawn care, exca­va­tion, and demo­li­tion. After he sold it, he stayed on for anoth­er year to ensure a smooth tran­si­tion. Then before the 2014 elec­tion, he learned that Clark County Jailer Bobby Stone wasn’t going to run again, so he decid­ed to seek the position.

He had nev­er been involved in pol­i­tics before, he said, but he would give it a try.

“I jumped in and got my feet wet, and they’re still wet,” he said with a grin.

Doyle is one of the few Democrats still in office in Clark County. Grant is a Republican. Doyle said he has enjoyed the polit­i­cal life, includ­ing attend­ing local events.

“It’s some­thing or oth­er that just kind of grows on you,” he said. “It’s giv­ing back to the community.”

Running the jail, how­ev­er, is a “big oper­a­tion,” he said.

Currently, there are about 260 inmates incar­cer­at­ed in the Clark County lock­up. That means 700 to 800 meals per day and plen­ty of laundry.

Finding the right bal­ance between local and non-local pris­on­ers isn’t easy.

The coun­ty is ful­ly respon­si­ble for pay­ing to house and care for coun­ty inmates. The coun­ty gets a per diem rate for state and fed­er­al inmates, but unless they’re trans­ferred to the coun­ty jail from some­where else, the coun­ty gets no state or fed­er­al fund­ing until they are sentenced.

And to bring in more mon­ey, the jail­er also will accept inmates from oth­er coun­ties if there is room enough for them.

“I’ve had as many as 300 in here, but it gets a lit­tle tight,” Doyle said.

What many peo­ple don’t under­stand, the jail­er explained, is that hav­ing more inmates from oth­er places doesn’t cost the coun­ty mon­ey; rather, it saves money.

What’s hard to pre­dict is what med­ical costs are going to be. Sammons said that for three years the coun­ty had an inmate from Mexico who was in the coun­try ille­gal­ly and was on dial­y­sis. He cost the coun­ty up to $140,000 a year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wouldn’t accept him because he had coun­ty charges.

Food is also a huge expense, and the jail is required to pro­vide a cer­tain caloric intake per pris­on­er and three meals per day.

“We couldn’t raise our own gar­den and serve the food as cheap as they’re doing it because of the amount of food that they buy,” Doyle said refer­ring to the suppliers.

And mechan­i­cal mal­func­tions, such as the cen­tral air con­di­tion­ing unit he had to replace not long ago, can blow a big hole in the budget.

According to the County Judge-Executive’s Office, the Fiscal Court pro­vides about $2 mil­lion out of the jail’s total cur­rent bud­get of $4.5 mil­lion. That’s down some from the last fis­cal year.

That isn’t unusu­al. Although local jails bring in some mon­ey, near­ly all of them have to be sub­si­dized by their coun­ty governments.

Doyle said that of 73 jails in Kentucky, only three of them oper­ate “in the black” because of spe­cial cir­cum­stances. Oldham County’s jail, for exam­ple, depends heav­i­ly on fed­er­al inmates from the Louisville met­ro­pol­i­tan area.

In recent years, there have been dis­agree­ments between the jail­er and coun­ty offi­cials over what the county’s con­tri­bu­tion should be. Doyle and Sammons, the finance direc­tor, recall that there was even talk of clos­ing the jail. But even if it were shut down, state require­ments would still have to be met. There has to be a book­ing oper­a­tion for inmates. The coun­ty must pay to trans­port them to oth­er jails. They are still respon­si­ble for their med­ical bills and oth­er costs.

They’ve run the num­bers and learned that it can be more expen­sive to not have a jail than to have one.

And cut­ting fund­ing sharply can have con­se­quences as well, Doyle said. If a deten­tion cen­ter doesn’t have ade­quate per­son­nel, the state and fed­er­al gov­ern­ments will remove their inmates from the facil­i­ty, and then the jail has no income, only expenses.

Doyle is not alone in his frus­tra­tion about state fund­ing for state inmates. As a mem­ber of the Kentucky Jailers Association, he pushed for leg­is­la­tion ear­li­er this year that would have increased the per diem rate the state pays to house its inmates. The bill also would have com­pen­sat­ed coun­ty jails retroac­tive­ly when state inmates are giv­en cred­it for time served. But that leg­is­la­tion died in committee.

Doyle said he cur­rent­ly gets only $35 per day for each state inmate, where­as inmates are housed in state facil­i­ties for $125 per day. The jail­er said the state saves more than $200 mil­lion by let­ting coun­ties keep its inmates.

“They’re putting the cost back on these small coun­ties, which is not right,” he said.

Doyle said he hopes the pro­pos­al will be back on the agen­da when the leg­is­la­ture meets again to con­sid­er its bud­get, and he hopes the coun­ty judge-exec­u­tives’ and mag­is­trates’ asso­ci­a­tions join the jail­ers in push­ing for its passage.

Doyle and his wife, the for­mer Sheila Meadows, have one adult daugh­ter, Chelsea Beard.