In rare good news for Swain County’s jail, a new agreement will soon usher federal prisoners into the often half-empty facility.

Sheriff Curtis Cochran has worked for months to secure an official deal with the U.S. Marshals Service, which will pave the way for the return of federal prisoners and score the county $55 per prisoner per day.

“We’re thrilled to have this agreement with the Marshal Service and look forward to working with them,” said Curtis.

For now, it’s hard to say how many federal prisoners will be filing into Swain’s jail. The new deal falls short of a contract, so the marshals aren’t obligated to send any prisoners, and the jail is not required to set aside a certain number of beds for them. Such contracts only go to jails with federal money invested.

Swain’s new $10 million jail, which opened in December 2008, is more than four times larger than what the county needs to house its own inmates. County leaders hoped to house overflow inmates from other counties, but those counties were simultaneously building new jails of their own.

The county recently learned its last and best customer, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is moving forward with plans for a jail of its own as well.

This flurry of jail building in the region has posed yet another problem for Swain — other new jails are stealing away a share of the federal prisoners up for grabs.

“Lucky for us, we had a lot of jails that were newly constructed,” said Lee Banks, supervisor of the U.S. Marshals office in Asheville. “When they came on line, we were quick to provide them with prisoners that we’ve had, Cherokee County in particular.”

Fortunately for Swain, though, a federal courthouse is located in Bryson City near the jail.

“It’s what, a mile away from where we’re at,” said Cochran. “If they’re going to utilize this courthouse, it would be more feasible for them to house their inmates here.”

Swain routinely housed federal prisoners until four years ago, when the Marshals Service pulled out due to safety concerns. The old jail was plagued by temperamental locks and lacked a fire sprinkler system. Back then, the daily rate for federal prisoners was only $30 per person.

Although the new jail opened 14 months ago, it has taken time to reconnect with the federal marshal service.

Banks said he hasn’t sent federal prisoners Swain’s way since the new jail opened more than a year ago simply because there have been less prisoners.

Swain’s jail is currently housing a lone federal prisoner, who’s been there since October.

“Now we’ve got plenty of jails on line, I have fewer prisoners,” said Banks. “I’m not complaining — it’s just that our prisoner population has been low recently.”

At this point, it’s difficult for Banks to pinpoint how many federal prisoners will soon be occupying Swain’s jail.

“We’re using multiple jails in multiple areas of the state,” said Banks. “So it’s hard for me to predict how many prisoners we’ll have in the future.”

Cochran estimates that he would have 21 beds available for federal prisoners, 16 male and five female, but that number is flexible, he said.

As of last week, Swain County had 40 inmates in its 109-bed jail, including 18 from Cherokee and one federal prisoner.

The on-going tension between Swain County commissioners and the sheriff has surfaced yet again, this time over the root cause of the county’s $1 million budget shortfall.

“If it hadn’t been for the expenditures of the sheriff’s office we would have been pretty much been alright,” County Manager Kevin King said.

King cited excessive overtime and several additional positions added to the sheriff’s office over the past year as driving up costs by several hundred thousand dollars over above the budgeted amount.

Sheriff Curtis Cochran said the county is using his department as a scapegoat.

“It looks to me like the budget shortfall is poor management on the part of county administration,” Cochran said. “They need to look in the mirror and see where the problem lies. They are the watchdogs of the budget.”

The county spent $160,000 last year on overtime for jailers and deputies. Overtime was racked up every pay period thanks to a shift schedule that gave jailers and deputies 20 hours overtime each two-week pay period. They worked 60 hours one week and 24 the next, with overtime paid out whenever they went over 40 hours in a seven-day period.

King said the problem has now been solved by switching the overtime rules effective this month. Overtime pay now kicks in only after deputies and jailers accrue 86 hours over a two-week pay period. The alternative system for paying — or rather not paying — overtime is allowed under Department of Labor rules for law enforcement workers who often have longer shifts clustered together for several days in a row but then get several days off, King said.

King said he met with jailers and deputies to explain the new method for calculating their pay. He said they don’t like the new arrangement.

King said Cochran used the overtime formula to pay his people more, an end run in essence around salaries he thought were too low for his workers, King said.

Cochran admits without the regular overtime “Their paychecks are going to go down drastically.”

“They just barely make enough money to live anyway. They were dependent on some of this overtime to help them survive,” Cochran said. Some are getting second jobs, dropping health insurance coverage and even seeking food stamps and Medicaid.

But Cochran said eking out more pay for his people wasn’t his motive when implementing the schedule. He said it was part of a move from 8-hour to 12-hour shifts, which are more common in law enforcement, and to rotate who works weekend instead of it always being the same people.

“When we implemented this I wasn’t aware they had to pay the overtime like they say they had to,” Cochran said. “When you are looking for someone to blame they will pick someone to blame.”

King said overtime was only part of the budget problems emanating from the sheriff’s office. Revenue at the jail fell short of expectations. County leaders opened a big a new jail last year that was overbuilt in hopes of housing more prisoners from out of the county for a nightly fee. But the number of inmates housed from outside the county declined, however, shattering the county’s hopes of subsidizing the overly large debt payments.

King has blamed Cochran, but Cochran said it is out of his control. The jail project was started before Cochran took office. The county undertook an oversized jail despite neighboring counties that once regularly housed inmates in Swain building new jails of their own and decreasing the need to rent out bed space.

In addition, the county added several new positions to the sheriff’s office and jail over the past year. The extra jailers were needed to man the larger facility, or so everyone thought.

“The county commissioners approved every bit of this,” Cochran said. “They had to approve all the expenditures for the jail. They are the watchdogs of the budget. I don’t have the check book up here to write checks.”

King said the county should have cut some of the extra jailers when it became clear the jail wasn’t filling up and the extra jailers weren’t needed. Instead of cutting the positions, the extra jailers were made deputies and kept on the payroll.

“That was probably a mistake,” King said. “We didn’t have the money to keep them.”

But King said the commissioners were sensitive to accusations from the public that they weren’t treating Cochran fairly.

“They didn’t want to be perceived as doing anything political,” King said. King said they had been repeatedly chastised for having an ulterior motive whenever they turned down Cochran’s budget requests.

“People need to have good public safety, but that is not the issue. The issue is there is not the money to do it,” King said.

Cochran currently has a lawsuit pending against the county alleging that commissioners cut his pay as political retribution when he took office three years ago. Prior to Cochran’s term, the sheriff was paid a lump sum to feed inmates in the jail and could keep the surplus, as opposed to the county just paying the actual cost of the food.

When the practice was curtailed as Cochran went into office he claimed the effective pay cut was political retribution since he was a Republican and the commissioners are Democrats. The tensions have been brewing ever since.

When Swain County opened a new $10 million jail last fall with 109 beds — four times bigger than necessary for its own inmates — it was banking on housing federal prisoners and those from other counties to subsidize the cost.

Instead, the number of inmates housed from outside the county has shrunk dramatically, not grown. As a result, the oversized jail has been a drain on county coffers and proved a source of contention in an on-going feud between the sheriff’s office and county commissioners.

County Manager Kevin King says the onus falls on the sheriff to court inmates from other counties to fill the jail.

“He said it wasn’t his place to get contracts, but it is,” King said. “It is going to take the sheriff talking to the other sheriffs.”

But Sheriff Curtis Cochran says the commissioners should have secured commitments from other counties before embarking on the bigger jail, which was already in the works when Cochran took office in late 2006.

“I believe one thing I would have done was to have contracts in hand,” Cochran said. “I would want to think if I didn’t have contracts in hand I would have thought about a smaller jail.”

The county was supposed to line up commitments as a condition of its federal loan to build the jail. Terms of Swain County’s loan with the U.S. Rural Development program stipulated “the applicant obtain written commitments from the other parties who have verbally committed to wanting access to jail beds.”

That never happened, however. Instead, the sheriff at the time, Bob Ogle, got verbal commitments, King said.

No demand for jail beds

Since Cochran took office, Swain has seen the number of inmates it houses from Graham, Cherokee and Haywood counties, as well as federal prisoners under the custody of the U.S. Marshall Service, all but dry up. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is the only outside entity contracting with Swain for jail space on a significant level.

The reason appears to have little to do with Cochran, however.

Like Swain, both Haywood and Cherokee counties have built new jails and can now handle their own inmate volume in-house. When Swain embarked on a new jail in 2005, it was common knowledge that other counties were doing so as well, but Swain overbuilt anyway.

Graham County is one of the only counties that still faces chronic over-crowding at its jail. But instead of sending inmates to Swain, it now sends almost all of its overflow to the new Cherokee County jail, according to Graham County’s chief jailer.

Cherokee County is closer for Graham, saving time and money on transport. In addition, Cherokee County charges only $40 a night per inmate while Swain charges $50 a night.

Cherokee County’s new jail — sporting 150 beds — is even bigger than Swain’s. It is often only half full, however — even with Graham County’s overflow and federal prisoners that once went Swain’s way — adding to the glut in jail beds the region seems to have these days.

As for the decline in federal prisoners, that trend was under way prior to Cochran taking office in late 2006. The U.S. Marshall Service had come to view Swain’s old jail as inadequate and unsafe. It was riddled with cracks and leaks and plagued by temperamental locks. But the biggest concern was no sprinkler system, the dangers of which came to light when eight people were killed in a fire at the Mitchell County jail.

“After the fire in Mitchell County there were concerns about older facilities without adequate fire suppression,” said Kelly Nesbit, chief deputy with the western district of the U.S. Marshall Service.

Nesbit began pulling federal prisoners out of the Swain jail and housing them elsewhere. Although Swain opened its new jail last fall, federal prisoners have yet to return. Nesbit said they simply got used to using other jails, and it has taken a while to get Swain back on the radar as a viable facility.

“The federal government moves slow. It just take a while for things to turn around,” Nesbit said.

The U.S. Marshall Service has 15 jails west of Interstate 77 that it uses to house prisoners, Nesbit said. But Bryson City is the location of a federal court, so it would be convenient to start housing them there again, he said.

Whose fault?

Cochran blames county leaders for the decline in federal prisoners. He said the county threw away a chance to put in a smoke evacuation system in the old jail that would have satisfied safety concerns and allowed them to keep housing the federal inmates.

The Marshall Service even came through with a $30,000 grant to help pay for the smoke suppression system, but Swain never acted on the grant and it was rescinded.

Cochran said the Marshall Service pulled strings to get the grant for Swain and was perturbed Swain decided they didn’t want it after all.

“The $30,000 allocated for Swain County was only provided after numerous phone calls and letters between myself and headquarters,” U.S. Marshall Gregory Forest wrote in a letter to Sheriff Bob Ogle in December 2003. Forest wrote that he wanted to continue their “long working relationship” with the county, but that the county “must complete this process without delay.”

The Marshall Service perceived it as a snub, Cochran said.

“They seemed to think that Swain County just wasn’t interested in housing their inmates because they wouldn’t accept the money after they went to great lengths to get it to help upgrade the jail,” Cochran said.

King said the county walked away from the grant because it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the system.

“The system would have cost a lot more than $30,000. It would have been around $100,000. That was just not doable,” King said.

Ultimately, the decision cost the county more in lost revenue than it would have spent to install the system. The county would have made its money back on the system in less than two years if federal prisoners had continued to flow Swain’s way at the same volume as years’ past. Instead, the county is now entering its third year without housing federal prisoners.

Cochran wasn’t sheriff during the episode over the sprinkler system and said he didn’t understand why they weren’t getting federal prisoners anymore. Cochran recently called a meeting with the U.S. Marshall Service to figure out what the problem was.

“After I got to investigating it a little bit and talked to the right people as to why we weren’t getting inmates, we started working on it,” Cochran said.

County blames Cochran

County commissioners suggested Cochran is to blame for a declining number of inmates being housed at the Swain jail from outside the county. The theory was vocalized during a county budget workshop in June. Cochran heard about the accusation and challenged King to name the counties that allegedly had a problem with him.

“I said ‘If there is somebody out there let me know so I can make amends,’” Cochran said. Cochran asked for the clarification three times, including twice via email.

King responded that he knew of no entity in particular other than a miscommunication with the Eastern Band last year. The Eastern Band, however, is the only entity that actually houses more prisoners with Swain now than it did three years ago.

Cochran said he is doing what he can to court other counties.

“When we moved into the jail I sent out an email to every sheriff’s office in the state and let them know we were in our new facility and had bed space,” Cochran said.

Cochran also met with the Graham County commissioners in the spring, and recently met with the U.S. Marshall Service.

One cloud hanging over the Swain jail is the escape of a murder suspect earlier this year. The suspect had been slipped a key by a jailer who ran away with the suspect. Cochran said the inside job was not a reflection on the security of the jail itself.

The escape has no bearing on whether to house overflow inmates there, according to Nesbit with the U.S. Marshall Service and the chief jailers from Graham or Cherokee counties.

“That’s happened in federal institutions before,” Nesbit said of escapes. “It is just part of the kind of business we are in.”

Declining inmate nights

Out-of-county inmates housed in the Swain jail have declined drastically under Sheriff Curtis Cochran compared to the last year of former sheriff Bob Ogle’s tenure.

2005-06    8,029 inmate nights from out-of-county

2008-09    3,940 inmate nights from out-of-county

By Curtis Cochran • Guest Columnist

As sheriff of Swain County, I would like to take this opportunity to respond to your editorial dated Jan. 28 (“Questions for the high sheriff”) and, in so doing, make reference to your article of Jan. 21 (“Incident heightens tensions between county, sheriff”). Both of these pieces were based in part upon an anonymous letter received by The Smoky Mountain News. The author of this letter is apparently unknown, and your Jan. 21 article quotes the Swain County Manager as saying “it was signed with a false name.” Your article further states that it was received by Swain County Commission Chairman Glenn Jones from its original anonymous source. It was then forwarded by the Swain County Administration Offices to Swain County commissioners and various media outlets.

The letter — and portions of the resulting editorial — made a number of misleading, unfounded and blatantly untrue allegations concerning the conduct of both myself and members of my office with respect to our attempts to apprehend Jody Smallwood, a recent escapee from a Swain County Courthouse holding cell. Smallwood had previously been convicted of at least five felonies. These allegations are not only reckless but unfairly call into question the integrity and professionalism of a dedicated group of Swain County law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line on a daily basis to insure that Swain County residents have a safe place to live. Attempts by anonymous persons to question the professionalism of these selfless individuals, without acquiring a complete understanding of the facts, is patently unfair and places these professionals in an even more dangerous position than they already possess.

With respect to my conduct, let me be clear that I, at all times, acted professionally and in the interests of, and with due caution for, the public, law enforcement personnel, and Mr. Smallwood. In the first paragraph of your editorial, you state that I “fired [my] gun at an escapee....” Thereafter, in the third paragraph, you again imply that I fired at Smallwood.

This is not true. There was never a shot fired at anyone during the Smallwood pursuit. Rather, in an attempt to bring the extremely dangerous situation to a safe conclusion, I fired two shots at the rear tire of the van that Smallwood was using to elude pursuing officers. Indeed, at least one of these shots hit the tire, ultimately disabling the van and playing a part in bringing it to a stop.

This occurred after Smallwood had recklessly traveled down Main Street in Bryson City at a dangerous rate of speed, made a left on Veteran’s Boulevard and, when turning east on to U.S. 74, exceeded the 100 mph mark. Once on U.S. 74, Smallwood continued to travel on rain-soaked roads to the Hyatt Creek Exit, where he exited the freeway, lost control of the van, spun the vehicle in a 360-degree turn, regained control and continued back onto 74 East, again at a high rate of speed.

After re-entering U.S. 74, Smallwood then brought the vehicle to a stop in the road. I exited my vehicle to take him into custody. At that point, he again accelerated and, fearing that he would injure or kill innocent travelers, I fired two shots at the rear tire of the vehicle. I did this while standing on the pavement. At no time did I fire from a moving vehicle, which was alleged in the anonymous letter.

Mr. Smallwood’s conduct placed the lives of Swain County citizens and visitors in jeopardy and was an immediate threat to their health and safety. It was my firm belief, then and now, that capture of him was necessary and that discharge of my weapon in an attempt to safely do so was justified. I based this belief, in part, upon Smallwood’s criminal history, his previous attempts to elude Swain County officers and events which occurred earlier in the day.

For instance, shortly after his escape from the courthouse lockup, Smallwood approached an 81-year-old woman, requesting that she give him a ride. At that time, the lady did not know that Smallwood was an escapee. At his direction, she drove him around Bryson City. Smallwood lied to her, saying he had been in a car wreck and wanted to go to the store. He then directed her to go to the 288 Boat Ramp and, when she refused to do so, he said that he wanted to go to his sister’s house. (His sister lives in another state.)

After driving for some time, they ended up in the Watson Hollow area, where he told this lady that he could not get out the passenger side of the vehicle and asked her to let him exit from her side. She felt that something was wrong and took the keys out of the vehicle before she let him out the driver’s side. Smallwood then went into the woods and left this lady to find her way back home. The Bryson City Church of God is just over the embankment from where Smallwood left the lady. This is where he stole the van.

Significantly, this was not the first time that Smallwood led law enforcement in Swain County on a high-speed pursuit through a downtown area. Two days prior to the Monday pursuit, Smallwood led federal, state, tribal and county officers on a high-speed chase that began in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, went through downtown Cherokee, west along U.S. 74, and ended across from West Elementary School. From there, Smallwood exited the vehicle and eluded arrest for another two hours. It was at this point that he was apprehended, after running through the woods for almost a mile.

On both of these occasions, Mr. Smallwood resisted law enforcement before being taken into custody. Indeed, resisting arrest and escape is consistent with Smallwood’s past. His multi-page criminal history contains numerous felony convictions dating back to 1989. In addition, he was wanted by officials in Georgia.

It goes without saying that Mr. Smallwood’s actions placed the lives and safety of third parties in jeopardy. His actions demonstrate that he had no reservations about driving through congested areas at high rates of speed. As sworn law enforcement officers, we were, at all times, acting with the utmost care and concern for the people of this county. This matter was handled professionally and, as a result of our actions, a dangerous individual is off the streets. My job is to protect and serve the people of Swain County, and that is what I intend to do as long as I am sheriff.

In your editorial, you made reference to my lack of law enforcement experience at the time that I was elected and began serving the people of Swain County. Again, this is misleading. As sheriff, I have graduated from the Sheriff’s Leadership Institute, which was held over several months in Raleigh and at Duke University. I am continually updated on all aspects of the sheriff’s office and, as a working sheriff for over two years, I have received training and experience that can only be acquired by day-to-day, hands-on interaction with the job. In addition, as sheriff, I qualify with my weapon on the same range and schedule as every deputy in this office.

When I ran for sheriff, I presented the citizens of Swain County with my qualifications and vision. After reviewing my background, these same citizens had enough faith in me to elect me Sheriff of Swain County. I appreciate the confidence that the people have placed in me and I will never overlook the fact that I, along with my staff, are at all times public servants.

Finally, in your initial article, you published portions of the anonymous letter. While this is certainly your right, it appears contrary to your own Anonymous Source Policy. That aside, it is very easy for someone to write a letter containing libelous allegations about a public official and then fail to sign it or, worse, use someone else’s name.

As sheriff of Swain County, I have always had an open-door policy. If any member of the public wishes to speak with me concerning the actions of either myself or sheriff’s office personnel, all they have to do is come to the sheriff’s office and ask. We will show them the same high degree of courtesy, professionalism and respect that we would any other resident or visitor of Swain County. The Office of Sheriff of Swain County has always been a position of high honor and integrity. And, with respect to the last paragraph of your Jan. 28 editorial, neither I nor the sheriffs of Swain County who preceded me have ever held ourselves to be above the law which we are sworn to uphold.

(Curtis Cochran is sheriff of Swain County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)