Sheriff recalls ‘different type of criminal’
Inmate demeanor has changed over the years, he says
By AnneMarie Knepper
Albany Democrat-Herald
“It was a different type of criminal in those days,” recalled Linn County Sheriff Tim Mueller, “back in the old jail.”
Sometime during the late 1980s and early 1990s, he said, drugs and other factors caused some inmates to become more violent, less respectful and generally uncooperative with jail staff.
Mueller said the demeanor of the average inmate in the early 1980s, though not always enjoyable, was at least tolerable.
“You would get guys that come into jail on a Friday or Saturday night and the worse that would happen is they would be drunk and wanting to fight,” said Mueller, who started with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office in 1984. “The next morning when they sobered up they were pretty easy to get along with.
“That was kind of a common occurrence,” he said. “But it was a different type of criminal in those days, I guess.”
Mueller, who was appointed sheriff in 2005, said he noticed a sea change in inmates from the late 1980s to the prisoners of the 1990s and today.
“It seems like there was kind of a code back then,” he said. “It’s kind of an odd thing to say, but inmates had their own special code of honor.”
He said if someone was causing trouble, “that brought heat on everyone in that cell block” and the inmates helped keep each other in check.
Then angel dust (PCP) and meth came along, he said. People would mix “kickers” into methamphetamine and “it would send them into a psychosis that would give them a huge amount of strength.”
“There was an element that was coming in that wasn’t there before,” Mueller said. These people would routinely take on deputies physically.
So much so, a special team trained to deal with the physical incidents was formed, the Critical Incident Response Team.
“A sort of SWAT team for the jail,” Mueller said. In September 2006, the CIRT and SWAT teams were rolled into one.
Also at that time, resources at the state level were closing down, limiting the number of psychiatric beds available.
“They were better able to deal with it than a corrections facility at the county level,” he said. “Those resources went away back in the late ’80s. And we have been suffering through that ever since.”
He said law enforcement encounters people with obvious mental issues disrupting others and “one of the only resources available is to arrest them for disorderly conduct.”
He said others don’t have mental issues, they just “want to hurt the people they are out in society with and they don’t care who they hurt while they are in custody.”
“Not that we didn’t get a few of those in the old days, but the numbers really started increasing in the 1990s, up to and including now.”
Mueller said the entire maximum security tank, D Block, contains only “high risk” offenders — anytime inmates change locations they have two deputies with them.
“It’s a sign of the times,” he said.
