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Study: Fewer inmates, better budget

La Plata County jail tries lockup alternatives

It turns out running a jail can be even more expensive than previously thought.

A study released last week examining what it actually costs to operate local lockups has found that a whole host of costs – from providing inmate health care to funding employee benefits – aren’t always covered as line items in a corrections department’s budget.

Across the country, researchers from the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice found jail costs are sometimes covered by other county agencies or general funds, adding to the true costs of incarceration.

“Knowing the actual price of jail is fundamental to reform,” said Christian Henrichson, the report’s lead author. “Without a grasp of the costs, policymakers will not know the full scale of potential savings.”

Running the more than 3,000 county jails across the country, which nearly 12 million people pass through every year, is notoriously expensive, and federal statistics put the price tag at about $22.2 billion.

But the Vera researchers, who surveyed 35 jails of all sizes from 18 different states with a combined average daily population of 64,920, found that another agency besides the corrections department or sheriff’s office paid for costs representing between 1 percent and 53 percent of total jail costs.

The New York City Department of Correction, which runs the nation’s second-largest jail system with about 11,000 average daily inmates, has a $1.1 billion budget. But an additional $1.2 billion from outside the budget is spent on jail operations such as inmate health care, education programs and pension obligations, the researchers found.

In La Plata County, much of the costs hidden in other places are factored into the budget. In 2014, the county spent $5.4 million to run the jail. This included costs associated with housing an average of 114 inmates a day, inmate health care, and all the costs associated with jail staff, budget documents show.

Either funds or in-kind contributions from a nonprofit providing educational services is not obvious in budget documentation.

The biggest jail expense across the board is staffing for corrections officers, including salaries and benefits, which, on average, account for about 75 percent of the surveyed jails’ expenses, Vera researchers found.

This holds true in La Plata County, where the 2014 budget for 59 full-time jail staff members was about $4.1 million, which is just shy of 76 percent of the budget.

Decreasing the overall inmate population is the only way to achieve significant savings, the report concludes

In La Plata County, an alternative to incarceration program that has been operating for decades has helped keep the jail population in check and helped create long-term savings, said Dan Bender a spokesman for the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office.

Without the program, the jail could have faced an expensive expansion, he said.

Similar efforts are going on around the country.

In Albuquerque, where officials have instituted a series of criminal-justice reforms such as issuing more citations than arrests, the jail population dropped over the course of fiscal 2014 by about 39 percent, from 2,496 inmates-per-day to 1,523. That decrease has allowed officials to stop spending money on out-of-county jail beds and to close a housing unit.

And in Springfield, Massachusetts, where dropping crime, fewer arrests and an increase of diversion and supervision programs resulted in a 30 percent drop in the inmate population between 2008 and 2014, the sheriff’s office closed six 55-bed housing units among other cutbacks, saving the department $13.1 million.

“The surest and safest way to save money is to take steps to reduce the inmate population,” Henrichson said.

Herald Staff Writer Mary Shinn, contributed to this report.



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