Warren County can make due with its current staff at the jail while officials wait to find a place to build a bigger jail, members of a local justice system committee were told Tuesday.

New numbers show 71 of the 138 inmates in jail at some point this week await trials on felony charges and 47 of those have been in jail less than three months, indicating a jail that’s still full around the clock but encouraging to those convinced major staff increases might be unnecessary.

“Over 50 percent of the ones in there who are simply awaiting trial or some action of the grand jury have only been there 90 days,” District Attorney Ricky Smith said, adding the most current numbers are inflated because the Warren County Grand Jury met two weeks ago, putting more suspects in cells. Smith estimated his office would take 800 cases to grand juries this year, up from 689 a year ago.

Though no job description was nailed down, jail consultants recommended the county hire someone to track how long inmates stay in the jail so spaces at the 103-year-old Cherry Street jail might be opened.

Reaction to the statistics indicated jail officials believe criminal cases are moved along as quickly as possible, with legal issues involving individual inmates out of their control.

“The way you broke down those numbers, it’s not that bad,” Warren County Sheriff’s Deputy Billy Joe Heggins said after Smith reported on this week’s numbers. “What it takes is the communication to keep this from becoming a problem.”

Heggins attended the meeting in place of Sheriff Martin Pace, who was at a funeral.

The committee previously has met three times, and jail population numbers were discussed then, too. In the week they met in mid-July, members were told 22 percent of the inmates had been incarcerated for six months; in September, the number was 10.5 percent.

In a study prepared this year for Warren County by Voorhis/Robertson Justice Services, jail stays averaged 29.6 days for 1,597 inmates in custody between Jan. 1, 2008, and Feb. 25, 2009. The sample showed 101, or 6 percent, were still in jail at the end of the period studied.

Ideal dimensions for a new jail dictate a 350-bed facility on a 20- to 50-acre site, with capacity expandable to 650 beds in the future, according to the study that cost the county about $116,000. Jail staff would have to triple compared to current levels after the first year, the study also noted. A property tax increase,built into a higher millage rate appears inevitable to finance the estimated $30 million project.

No site has been chosen and no money has been allocated for a jail in the county budget. Property has been vetted inside Vicksburg and outside, including wooded areas off East Clay Street and at the “spec building” at Ceres Research and Industrial Interplex. Supervisors have said little publicly about any potential site.

The committee meets again Jan. 26, 2011. With major pieces of building a new jail on the back burner, left members questioned the need to meet at all.

“Are we going to build a jail?,” Youth Court Administrator Rachel Hardy asked as Tuesday’s session ended. “I mean, I’m just asking… because what we were told up-front during the studies and all is totally different from what we sat around and talked about today.”

District 1 Supervisor David McDonald, who has organized the meetings and led visits to jails in other states before and during the study, said a chief goal of the committee — sitting as many city and county officials down at the same table to share ideas on how criminal cases are processed — is an accomplishment.

“What I think our committee is trying to do is to come up with ideas,” McDonald said. “I mean, when was the last time the DA, the judges, the sheriff, the supervisors and the city got around the table to talk about this? We’ve never done it.”

Earlier this year, caps were placed on fees submitted to the county by attorneys appointed by the circuit bench to represent indigent clients to bring down costs. Consultants recommended replacing an informal rotation of 30 to 40 attorneys with a public defender staff, though no details on annual salary and participation have been finalized.