Erie County needs a new sheriff.

If it's not truly dangerous convicted felons finding their way out of their cells in the

county's downtown Holding Center or its Alden Correctional Facility, then it's neglect,

mistreatment, even suicide among inmates who may have been waiting for their first look at the

inside of a courtroom.

Case after case, documented or credibly alleged, has arisen over the last few years, all of

them posing a threat either to the general public or to inmates whose health and safety are

legally and morally the responsibility of the county that has incarcerated them.

But whenever these concerns are raised, whether by inmates, their grieving loved ones or

state and federal officials, the response of Erie County Sheriff Timothy B. Howard and his

staff is the same.

It's not our fault. We're being unfairly picked on.

If that's the best that Howard and company can do, then it is time for the sheriff to step

aside — or be removed. Someone needs to take responsibility for this difficult but

crucial local government function.

The latest sad example of how the current regime tries to turn every critique into a

political football came last week when the New York State Commission on Corrections issued a

blistering review of how a series of oversights and blunders allowed a dangerous prisoner to

get out of his cell.

Rather than taking the findings of the state commission, headed by another experienced

lawman, to heart, Howard made himself invisible and trotted out an underling to blast the

report as a "vicious personal attack on Sheriff Howard based on politics and an attempt to

alarm the public."

But the report was not political. And the public ought to be alarmed.

It's true that the inmate found his way onto the roof, not the street. But that was pure,

dumb luck.

As the commission found, it was not one oversight that allowed Brian Collins, previously

convicted of violent crimes and known to be an escape risk, to get dangerously close to

freedom. It was a series of goof-ups and acts of horrific negligence that suggest a systemic

failure on the part of jail management. Doors left unlocked. Other doors opened by remote

control by people who did not know or, seemingly, care who they were talking to. Radios left

unattended.

If this were the only embarrassment in recent jail management, it would be easier to take.

But it is not. Other escapes or mistaken releases have led to violent crimes, including one

rape in 2009 and the murder of a state trooper in 2006.

Meanwhile, while dangerous criminals have been allowed to cause more danger, petty

violators and people not adjudged guilty of anything have been mistreated, denied basic

hygienic and human needs, kept from their medications and, according to a report from the U.S.

Department of Justice, been the victim of violent beatings administered either by jail

personnel or other inmates.

Worst, the Holding Center has been the scene of numerous suicides. Prisoners die by their

own hands there at five times the national norm — including, recently, three in a period

of less than 90 days.

Again, when such allegations are raised, Howard and his staff, all too often defended by

County Executive Chris Collins and County Attorney Cheryl Green, do not deny them so much as

suggest that others are wrong to raise the issue.

Last week the new mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, held a news conference in which he

invited the Justice Department to conduct a top-to-bottom review of that city's troubled

Police Department. Landrieu faced the fact that the department has become so bedeviled by

accusations of violence and abuse, much of it in the anarchic wake of Hurricane Katrina, that

fixing the problem was beyond his ability.

The situation at the Erie County Holding Center and Alden Correctional Facility should not

be so far gone that a change in upper management, up to and including the sheriff himself,

would fail to meet the needs.

Howard has made it clear that he sees no real problems in the jails, problems that are his

responsibility to fix. There are, and he needs to step aside.

If he will not do so, then Gov. David A. Paterson needs to exercise his constitutional

power to remove the sheriff and appoint a replacement who can clean up this mess.

Before more money is wasted. Before more lives are lost.