Kent’s newest city staffer aims at keeping city jail population down

It’s a numbers game for Aaron Hasenoehrl as the new Kent city jail-population manager.

Hasenoehrl just started the newly created job last week. City officials came up with the position in an effort to keep jail capacity at 80 inmates or lower.

The Kent City Council directed staff last year to find ways to keep the number of inmates down after it decided against joining other south county cities in building a new regional jail.

The city jail along South Central Avenue opened in 1986 and houses misdemeanor offenders sentenced to less than one year. That includes offenses such as drunk driving, domestic violence, minor assaults and petty theft.

The jail has 96 beds and can handle up to 120 inmates with mattresses on the floor.

Hasenoehrl will work with other jail officials, judges, prosecutors as well as probation and police officers to find ways to maintain space for the highest-impact offenders while others serve time through work-release programs, work crews and electronic home monitoring.

“The biggest thing is communication and making sure everyone is on the same page,” Hasenoehrl said Wednesday at the jail.

The position is funded for 2 1/2 years through a $240,000 grant from the Department of Justice. The City Council will decide after that time whether to make the position part of the city budget.

For the first few months on the job, Hasenoehrl will spend a lot of time figuring out the jail system.

“We’ve asked Aaron to learn what we’re doing,” said Capt. Bob Cline, who oversees jail operations. “After a month or two, he will come back with ideas after he sees what the issues are and what jail employees and other stakeholders have to say. Then we will look at the system and see what we can address.”

Hasenoehrl, 34, worked for one year as supervisor in the Public Education Unit of the Kent Police before he was laid off last year as part of the city budget cutbacks. He previously worked four years as a King County Sheriff’s deputy.

Hasenoehrl had to give up his job as a deputy after a 2002 motocross accident left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair. He spent a lot of his spare time riding motorcycles until he crashed on a jump and broke a vertebrae, pinched his spinal cord and suffered nerve damage to his legs.

The chance to work at a jail appealed to Hasenoehrl.

“It was something that was in the back of my mind,” he said. “After the injury, I thought about it but I could not be a corrections officer because of my injury. This gives me an opportunity to work in that arena.”

The challenges become even bigger to reduce the number of jail inmates when Kent annexes the Panther Lake area July 1. Nearly 24,000 new residents will boost the city’s population to about 112,380.

“That’s about 25 percent more population to the city so that’s about 25 percent more to the jail population,” Cline said. “We don’t have 25 percent more beds.”

But with Hasenoehrl in the new position of jail population manager, Cline looks forward to finding answers about how to reduce the number of inmates.

“He’s worked for us before and with his attitude and demeanor he can bring groups together,” Cline said.

Many of those groups were represented on a jail task force last year that came up with the idea of hiring a jail population manager. The task force included members of the city prosecutor’s office, jail, municipal court, probation department, the corrections officers union and the police department.