Some inmates will be sent to other counties as part of a concerted effort to alleviate overcrowding in the Grant County Jail.
Sending out enough inmates to bring the population down to capacity will cost more than $1.3 million per year, Sheriff Del Garcia told the county council Wednesday.
The council approved a request by Garcia to create a line item in the budget called, “Out-of-County Inmate Housing” and will vote on funding for the item at its next meeting.
Garcia will ask the council for an appropriation of $400,000 for initial funding of the item, he said in a follow-up phone interview on Friday.
Garcia’s estimate of $1.3 million annually is based on a cost of $40 per day, for 80-85 inmates, he told the council.
The jail’s capacity is 274 but it has been consistently higher since 2016, Garcia said, aside from one month in 2020 that the population was at or under capacity.
The population of the jail on Friday was 355, Garcia said.
“That’s just the cost of housing them,” Garcia said of the cost estimate. “Medical costs are an unknown.”
Transportation costs also were not factored, and will require approximately three additional employees, Garcia said.
“There are nine counties that touch Grant County. As of today, we haven’t been able to find one county that touches Grant County that will take any of our inmates. So, now we are looking at having to go further out from Grant County. We would try to place those that have already been sentenced and are doing their time in our jail,” Garcia told the council. “For those that we couldn’t do that with, obviously we would have to provide transportation from the facility to court dates, court hearings and different things like that.”
Other efforts are continually being made to keep the jail population down but public safety cannot be compromised in the process, Garcia said.
“We’ve requested other Grant County law enforcement agencies to cite people in court for minor offenses instead of bringing them to jail,” Garcia told the council. “We have spoken with city court judges to implement a program where nonviolent offenders and nonrepeat offenders can be released on their own recognizance after spending the allotted amount of time according to their charges. We have worked with the court in releasing nonviolent offenders with chronic medical conditions, and that also helps with some of the medical costs that we have to pay.”
Garcia said they have also worked with the state to have violent offenders with mental disorders moved into state facilities.
The county also utilizes a home detention program through Community Corrections and a pretrial program that helps to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail, Garcia said.
As of Friday, about 30 inmates were being held in the jail on misdemeanor charges, Garcia said.
“The vast majority of the inmates are facing some type of felony charge. We do try to get those low-level offenses, nonviolent offenses, released on their own recognizance or cited through court and things like that,” Garcia said.
The issue of overcrowding is not new to this administration but has been an issue consistently since at least 2016, Garcia told the council.
“It even goes back earlier than that. This jail was built originally built in the 80s with three floors. It wasn’t too long –I think three years after it was built –that they had overcrowding issues,” Garcia said.
Three additional floors were added to the jail in the early 1990s, Garcia said.
“It was not too long after those floors were added they had issues again with overcrowding,” Garcia said.
The council and commissioners worked together last year to obtain a jail study that estimated the cost of a new jail with a larger capacity at $120 million.
Shane Middlesworth, council president, told Garcia he had reached out to Indiana State Board of Accounts to find out about funding through the tax base and that a 0.2 percent public safety correctional rehab tax can be implemented.
“That is the maximum. At the 0.2 percent, with the 2024 payable numbers, it’s $2,540,000 per year,” Middlesworth said. “Roughly we can do 22 to 25 years so we are looking at $63 million and some change for an all-in cost. When you’re talking a $120 million jail, $63 million isn’t that much. Units are going to have to work together to decide what can we afford when it comes to the jail.”
In a joint session between the county council and the county commissioners about the jail in September, Dale Davis, director of planning at Envoy Companies, a construction and development company, addressed the issue of affording a new jail.
“People have been talking about the budget number that we shared at the last meeting. That’s not the budget,” Davis said at the September meeting. “That is a conceptual number that could generate a facility with the number of beds we need. The reality is, if that’s not the amount of funding that’s available in the community, that’s not our budget.”
Middlesworth also added that county is still paying the bond for the $8.9 million renovation and repair project from 2018.
“We still owe $7.1 million just in principle from the last renovation project,” Middlesworth said.
The council will vote to approve the appropriation of dollars to the Out-of-County Inmate Housing fund at its next meeting on March 20.
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