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Two men with 154 arrests between them are putting the spotlight on Portsmouth’s homeless crisis, the lack of mental health care for the most desperate among us, and continuing issues with parolees not sticking to the terms of their supervision.
On November 22, Police arrested 43-year-old Christopher Lampkin for disorderly conduct. This was the 72nd time the troubled man had been in the Scioto County Jail.
The following day, officers took 62-year-old Gregory Stevens into custody for the 82nd time. Stevens was also arrested for disorderly conduct. This was his 18th arrest of 2022. All of Stevens’s arrests have been for disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, or violating his probation for previous similar charges. The homeless man frequents many Gallia Street businesses and has a habit of helping himself to shopping carts, which he fills with the trash he collects in his travels. Stevens is not known to be violent, but he does sometimes refuses to leave businesses and does get agitated when people take his cart or the trash he collects away.
Police often have contact with Stevens multiple times in a day but generally don’t arrest Stevens unless he violates no trespass orders or doesn’t cooperate and leave. However, neither police nor Stevens’s family members have been successful at finding proper care for the troubled man, who invariably ends up back on the street.
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Lampkin also has a long history of disorderly conduct arrests, but there are also charges of drug abuse, assault, and multiple parole and probation violations. He is currently on parole for drug possession and theft charges. His parole began in early 2020, and he has been arrested 17 times since then on charges ranging from probation violation to drug possession to parole violation.
In both cases, the men were almost immediately released from jail. Neither the police nor the Scioto County Jail makes the decision about the release.
As Judge Steven Mowery explained to SCDN in a previous article, the State of Ohio sets the standards as to when people should be released, and they do not like it if counties keep people incarcerated on minor charges like disorderly conduct.
