Kitchen

Kitchen

Continued from page 1

the ground floor hall or anteroom of the courthouse to be called to testify, witnesses for the two sides are “scatter-shot together," a situation which could jeopardize the outcome of a trial, he added.

And finally, the county administrator pointed out that when the jail was renovated six years ago, the cost share was 80 percent state and 20 percent local. The split is now 5050. “The trend has shown clearly that state funding to localities is going down,” he said, adding that delay may find the county paying an even larger percentage. “My recommendation is we should be looking very seriously at building a jail addition in the next fiscal year,” Mr. McCarthy concluded. #

“I softened on this business," volunteered Stonewall-Hawthorne Distinct Supervisor Nelson Lane, a longtime opponent of a jail kitchen and an adv(feate for contracting with an outside party for the jail’s food service. “I think the days are over for running hot meals up and down the highway in the back qf^ripickup truck,” he acknowledged, asking for an estimate on how long the jail with an addition would provide adequate capacity.

“I don't see any reason why that jail couldn’t hold our prisoners safely for at least the next 10 years,” Sheriff Woodward answered. He explained that Rappahannock’s jail has been crowded only when prisoners have been held for other localities which have been caught in space crunch by delays on the part of the state in accepting its prisoners. “If the state would take prisoners in a timely fashion, we’d all be fine!"

Formerly, those receiving terms of a year or less served their time in local jails rather than state penitentiaries, the sheriff said. "Now if they get less than four years, the state's leaving them right in the local jails