“With a month left on a 480-day sentence, a man convicted of drinking and driving was allowed to go home from the Oak Harbor city jail this week. At the same time, a woman was also released early on a sentence for felony escape and chronically driving without a license.These cases are not unusual at the city’s cramped, 50-year-old jail, according to City Attorney Phil Bleyhl. When the jail is at capacity, he says the city sometimes agrees to allow inmates who have served most of a long sentence, and haven’t caused any trouble, go home early.And that practice may become even more prevalent in the future as the city’s population grows and the jail capacity stays at the same level it was in the 1950s. A day may soon come when then the aging jail is simply overwhelmed, Bleyhl said.With the city’s current budget problems, there is no help — or even plans — on the horizon for the jailhouse. According to one jailer, many people in the community don’t even know the city has a jail.“Maybe someday the voters will care about the shape of public buildings, but I don’t see it in the future,” said Oak Harbor Police Detective Sgt. Jerry Baker. He oversees the operation of the jail.The jail has eight beds in three tiny cells for male prisoners and four beds in a single cell for women. With a few exceptions, the people imprisoned in the jail have committed misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor crimes. The most common crimes include driving offenses and domestic violence. On Friday, there was one female and nine male prisoners, which meant one man had to sleep on a mat on the floor. Baker says state law limits the number of days an inmate can be kept on a mat, without a bunk, to three days in a row.“People think we can just stack them like cord wood, but we have to follow the law,” he said.Tight fitFrom the inside, the jail looks like what it is — a facility built in the 1950s. Everything is cramped. One of the men’s cells, with two bunks, measures about eight-foot by eight-foot. The showers are rust-stained. The hallways are tight. The changing room doubles as the visiting room. The refrigerator with all the inmate’s food is stuck in back of the untidy evidence room. The breathalyzer room is also used to interview suspects.Corrections Officer Bruce Sproull said the jailers were delighted when the doors to the two small holding rooms were recently replaced. The old ones were dented and beat-up from years of abuse from angry prisoners.Sproull admits that working in the environment can be a challenge. Unlike the county jail, he says the jailers work face-to-face with the prisoners and are usually in very close contact with everyone coming in. Around 100 people are booked into the jail each month, though most of them don’t end up staying overnight in a cell.“It’s tough to do what we’re trained to do because there’s not enough space to work with,” Sproull said.For example, the hallways are so narrow that a person can’t walk by a cell without standing in arm’s reach of potential violence.Just recently, Sproull found himself in a very dangerous situation when he was escorting a new inmate to a jail cell. Another man behind bars lunged at the new guy and Sproull was caught in between. The jailers were able to subdue the men before anyone was hurt.In addition to dealing with inmates, the seven people who work as jailers are responsible for transporting prisoners to court, fingerprinting, processing concealed weapons permits, processing film, enter pawn slips and other information into a computer database, and handling arrest warrants.For the sake of security, video cameras monitor all areas of the jail, except the showers and visitors’ room. There’s an audio monitoring system that allows the jailers to hear everything that is happening from the control room.Baker says the police department does what it can to relieve crowding and avoid cabin fever in the jail. Each cell has a color TV. Inmates have access to a small library. An air conditioning system was recently installed into the jail. According to Sproull, the inmates who committed non-violent crimes can volunteer to do work outside of the jail for the city during the day. It usually involves cleaning or physical labor for the city public works department or the marina.Fortunately for the city, the Island County jail is available as a back up. Sproull says the city jailers often send overflow or especially violent prisoners to the larger, more secure facility.That, of course, may end once the county jail starts reaching its capacity. “