ANDERSON – Madison County is spending close to $1,000 per day to house inmates in neighboring counties because of overcrowding at the local jail.
Madison County Sheriff Scott Mellinger said there were 290 inmates being housed at the jail, a facility designed to house 207.
Currently the county has 26 inmates housed in Blackford and Delaware counties. The state reimburses the county $35 per day for inmates that have been sentenced on Level 6 felonies and are being housed locally instead of through the Indiana Department of Correction.
Mellinger said it takes 90 minutes to transport the Level 6 inmates to Blackford County each way; the trip to Muncie is an hour round trip. That doesn’t include the cost of transporting the inmates to Anderson for court appearances and meetings with attorneys.
Steve Sumner, president of the Madison County Council, said the cost to house inmates in other counties is a big concern.
“It’s frustrating because we were told an additional 50 beds in the Madison County Community Correction facility would buy us 10 years before having to build a jail,” he said. “For some reason the building was downsized and only added 25 beds.”
Sumner said with the county looking to spend $700,000 on the Eisenhower Bridge project for each of the next five years, funding is becoming a problem for the council.
“We need to look at the big picture,” he said. “We’re throwing money at things and not getting the return.”
Sumner said the inmate population with drug abuse and mental health issues is increasing the local costs.
“When I took office two years ago, we were averaging 190 to 200 inmates a day,” Mellinger said. “We had a spike in the summer of 2015, which was expected. Now we are seeing a big spike, a small decrease and then another big spike.”
Mellinger said he doesn’t expect to see the numbers come down in the near future.
“The cases are not going through the system as quickly as two years ago,” he said. “At some point the people we’re letting out of the jail because of the overcrowding are, too many times, people that need to be in jail.”
Sumner said the council needs to get the judges, prosecutor and sheriff together to move cases through the judicial system as quickly as possible.
Last year the county spent $1.6 million to construct a new minimum security facility to house 132 inmates.
Mellinger said the newly opened Madison County Community Corrections facility is not working to reduce the number of inmates housed in the jail.
“It’s not big enough,” he said. “The MCCC staff is doing a phenomenal job of keeping our population down. The facility is not designed to deal with the people we’re housing.”
Sumner said he has thought about leasing back the former community corrections facility owned by local attorney Max Howard.
“We have to address the overcrowding problem sooner rather than later,” he said. “We can use (Howard’s) property to relieve the problem, but then we’re looking at additional staffing costs.”
Mellinger said the county doesn’t have five years before a new jail will have to be constructed and the county will be facing serious consequences.
Sumner agreed the county must look at constructing a jail in the next three to four years.
“I talk to the (Madison County Council) all the time about the overcrowding and the mechanical issues at the jail,” Mellinger said. “We’re housing up to 28 people in a cell block designed for 16. The facility is overwhelmed.”