Sheriff Calls in Feds Again to Help Fix County’s Dysfunctional Jails

She also laid out her efforts to address a laundry list of recommendations the National Institute of Corrections gave the county in January.

Multnomah County Jail. (Brian Burk)
By Lucas Manfield

Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell has asked the National Institute of Corrections to help stem the smuggling of drugs into Multnomah County’s jails, where two inmates overdosed and died last year.

“NIC was able to identify two technical resource providers, and in the coming weeks, we will be meeting with them and discussing a plan moving forward,” O’Donnell said during an April 23 briefing of county commissioners.

She also laid out her efforts to address a laundry list of recommendations NIC gave the county in January. That scathing report called on the county to fix the relationship between the two siloed government offices that staff the jail—the sheriff’s office and the county health department—and recommended O’Donnell name a new independent “CEO” of jail health.

It’s not clear when, or if, that will happen.

In a presentation at that same board briefing, the embattled director of Corrections Health, Myque Obiero, showed a slide saying the county was “not moving forward” with plans to hire an independent contractor to oversee health care at the jails. “We continue to work on every other recommendation with the sheriff’s office,” he said.

Still, county officials plan to shift $200,000 from contingency funds to the sheriff’s office to address the silos, as WW reported April 22.

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